M.O. (Mauthausen Orchestra) "Where Are We Going" CD
For the 2008 album Where Are We Going,
Italian power electronics pioneer Pierpaolo Zoppo shortened his
Mauthausen Orchestra name down to M.O., but the black pulsating
electronics that he is known for are still in full force. It is more subdued than the tumorous throbbing horror of such classic Mauthausen Orchestra recordings as Necrofellatio and Murderfuck,
and dispenses with the explicit images of hardcore sex and extreme
violence that made his early albums so notorious, but this is still an
unsettling listen, it just takes it's time digging in under your skin.
Released by Bloodlust! in a nice digipack package, Where Are We Going
is a series of controlled, minimal meditations using extreme distortion
that strive to capture the essence of a futile existence, and when I
crank this to a sufficiently damaging volume level, it achieves a kind
of sonic brain-death through a mixture of abrasive drones and blown-out
melodious keyboard dissonance. I'm reminded of Bianchi's recent
organ-drone experiments, but Zoppo goes for a much more abrasive aural
assault. Such as on the opening track "Intimate Pulsation", which
starts as a minimal noisy drone, but evolves into steady streams of over
modulated digital distortion that build into a thick multi-layered roar
of sputtering, crackling noise. "Sometime Happen" is a much more
dramatic piece, a seething mass of ultra-distorted drones and keyboard
clusters with extreme blown-out melodies and atonal notes forming within
the wall of roiling distorted noise. The densely layered melodic chaos
again reminds me not only of Bianchi, but also of some of Prurient's
extreme synth pieces. More of these extremely distorted synthclusters
form the nucleus of "When Suffering Becomes Show", but it later morphs
into a swarming metallic buzz and fluttering keyboard notes, and ends up
resembling an experimental electronic score for a 70s science fiction
film. The shorter track "Confusion" is almost kosimiche with it's
clusters of murky mid-range keys and whooshing tones bathed in speaker
crackle, and "Not Allowable" creates a disorienting effect with phased
organ drones that stretch endlessly outward. Altogether, these
distorted synthdrones burn their way into your grey matter nicely.
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