SYMPHONY 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.

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