SYMPHONY FOR A GENOCIDE

It's better to be advertised, Maurizio Bianchi's first essays define a musical world made of industrial experiments & artefacts, recycled noises and aggressive electronic variations. This is very far from his late and much more convincing efforts in meditative, introspective atmospheric (almost "ambient") electronic textures. "Symphony For A Genocide" is a concept album around the horror of Nazis "concentration" camps. No emotion here, just a musical universe full of terrific, auto-destroyed, extreme, atonal, pulverizing sounds. Contrary to most of critics I don't recognize this album as one among the best Bianchi's . "Symphony For A genocide" is very hard to approach, to digest and remains very cryptical. I prefer Bianchi in his extremely touching inspired "looped" melodies played with sensitivity ("AMB Iehn Tale", "M. I. Nheem Alysm"...). I personally think that an album as "The Testamentary Corridor" (Staalplat, 2006) would be a better evocation & testimony for a genocide.

What is likely the Italian industrialist/noise-maker/ambient minimalist Maurizio Bianchi's most well-known work is also a very weighted one. Symphony For A Genocide is a conceptual album dealing with the holocaust and the concentration camps where this took place, all of the tracks being named after a concentration camp. But there is more here conceptually. From the 2015 vinyl reissue from Rotorelief MB draws parallels between these death camps, the processes behind them, and the destruction of "the will of the individual, and to create industrialization of death", and what he charges the modern world with, that of destroying "individual human choice with mass marketing and media, those being synonymous with mass destruction, establishing a city of death.". The conclusion is that this album is a "pathetic symphony for both". Often M.B. ascribes his releases with some philosophical, conceptual or theological (TBH usually reading like a word salad of philosophical pessimism) influence or ideation, and my reaction to these is to google what the hell half the words mean and go 'Okay anyway!'. Don't get me wrong, I love the liner notes for M.B.'s releases.

For all the philosophical musings and wordy waxing M.B. tends to, this album, and all his early 80's output is a bit yin and yang. This is the definition of early raw unpolished industrial music, forget TG, Skinny Puppy, Chrome. Nothing harmonious or melodic to be found here, only scratchy, ugly, rhythmic mechanical pulsations and degraded layers of warbling, off kilter synth stabs and whines, often crammed through hissing cassette recorders and transistor radios (snatches of radio can be heard on Belzec) for extra ugliness. Synths dopily groaning in agony, while the production line heaves and reverberates underneath the mess of keyboards and synths. It's a soundscape of machines, factories, and industrial complexes bashing and groaning ever onward slathered in heaps of decomposing tape muck and fuzzy radio static, much like the machine of mass consumption in parallel. This 45 minute "pathetic symphony" is, whether tenuous parallels or not, a masterpiece of early 'true' industrial work.

This version of 'Symphony for a Genocide' is the re-mastered one. Its sharper and more harsh in sound than the 'Dark Vinyl' CD I own from the early 90's which sounds far murkier and darker - almost as though your listening to it at the bottom of a mine-shaft. The clean up job has almost been too good, sterilising the overall dirtiness of the recording.

This is probably my favourite 'Industrial Noise / Drone' cd of all time. A genre I pretty much dislike these days. Is it all part of growing older? I used to love Controlled Bleeding, Dissecting Table, Merzbow etc, but find it all a bit hard to take these days.

'Symphony for a Genocide' is purely electronic, intensely claustrophobic and has a faint semblance of a couple of tunes attached to it. Everything sounds grumbly and whiney and is overflowing with delay and reverb which leads to a very creepy and atmospherically evil recording. Brilliant! Just the kind of stuff I like!

There's nothing remotely 'Prog' about this album nor any other MB album, but it's without doubt his best and is the one Electronic, Noise, Drone recording I've always got time for.

Petrify your neighbours by playing this in the middle of the night. They'll think Fred and Rose West have moved in.

The kind of music that makes you think that there's faces staring at you through windows...

Ugly sound sculptures reflecting on the human condition

Still within the confines of the boot shaped country, this review does however take a huge u-turn musically and goes from the prodigal rock fires of classic RPI, to the eroding harshness of electronic pioneer Maurizio Bianchi. His 1981 release Symphony for a Genocide has become quite the cult artefact these days, and whether by way of it's unfriendly jaggedy appearance or indeed for its reputation for being the progressive electronic album equivalent to Trout Mask Replica, it continues to remain a highly sought out item among the more mad electrolytes. The two albums obviously bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever, but there's a deliberate insanity and impossibly difficult aura surrounding both, which has most music writers pulling out their teeth - talking about anti-music and the emperor's new clothes.

I am very open to experiments, also the completely bonkers ones, but in order for me to really get into them, there needs to be some form of soul or passion behind. So naturally when Maurizio Bianchi decided to refrain from any such qualities in order to relegate the grim fear and purgatorial evil of the death camps of W.W.ll, I find myself equally mystified by the complete lack of melody and concord, and the fact that nothing on the album seems even remotely listenable.

Sounding like a soundtrack to an industrious slaughterhouse with cold robotic machine noises, Symphony for a Genocide does succeed in its quest for authentic apocalyptic music. It almost supersedes it's goal. To me personally, this album is far better on recollection. The more time that passes between each listen of it, the more strangely enamoured with the very idea behind the album I seem to get - an idea that rivals even the most frightening of war museums in terms of portraying the unthinkable horror of the holocaust. Then I put the album on and reach halfway, before my brain thirsts for feel.....

The synths on this colossus of a record are uniquely ugly. That's the first thing you'll probably pick up on. Without a milligram of melody they sound like old arcade games music gone berserk. Corroding, slicing, pulverising their way through your speakers the sheer impact of them will either have you nurturing strange erotic thoughts about skips and large oil tankers, or perhaps more likely make your skin crawl.

On the other hand, you have to give Bianchi credit for having the balls to release this thing. While there'd been a number of abstract personalities on the progressive electronic scene, Maurizio took what Conrad Schnitzler flirted around with in an embryonic phase and cultivated it, or indeed tortured the hell out of it, subsequently coming up with this horrific industrial voyage through one of mankind's darkest chapters.

So there you have it: one of the most unique, unlistenable and memorable records ever made. I am thrilled to have it in my collection, don't get me wrong - while I detest the music, I adore the notion of having physical remnants of the outer extremities of the forever winding age old music tree.