I am delighted to own another highly eccentric item from Ezio Piermattei, the mysterious and absurdist Italian composer / musician from Bologna who memorably dislocated my brain-pan with two of his far-out albums in 2012, which he released under the aliases of Hum Of Gnats and poisucevamachenille. Now reinventing himself yet again as Autopugno, he serves up two further crazed tape collages on Carpa Cavernosa (NO LABEL CDR). Unlike those two previous mind-zonkers which did feature performed music and acoustic instruments, this album appears to have been realised with just magnetic tape, microphones, and effects – which makes it all the more impressive. Piermattei steps up to the plate and spews out a baffling range of mouth-music in the manner of Henri Chopin at his most demented, sputtering, coughing, spitting and grunting into the recording device, making multiple overdubs and edits of these oral eruptions, and assembling the results into an insane, scrambled, non-musical nightmare of semi-human proportions. Clever editing is used to fragment everything into tiny portions of nonsensical weirdness, and nutsoid elements are stacked on top of each other to hasten your dispatch to Bedlam. There’s also some metallic percussion clatterments, which likewise follow the illogical patterns which the creator demands. Each piece is edited and structured so as to present many inexplicable pauses and breaks, so that the listener is in a constant state of bewilderment, wondering what we’re hearing and what’s coming next.
While superficially this album may appear understated and slightly less “wild” than those two crazed predecessors, I suspect it’s informed by the same undercurrent of fractured thinking and deranged imagination, such that your sense of normality will soon be sapped and replaced by a warped, distorted view of reality, as surely as if you exchanged your eyeballs with those of a mad loon from the bughouse. Put simply, the record is not rooted in reality; apart from a few instances of “found tapes” and brief passages where voices are recognisably babbling in Italian, Carpa Cavernosa occupies its own indescribable sound world. I’m personally delighted that Ezio sends us this material, and am even more delighted by his refusal to explain anything – no letters, no press release, no album notes, no website. Silence and exile – it’s the best way, especially if you’re about to purchase a one-way ticket to the rubber room. From 31 October 2013. Limited to 50 copies; no idea how you can get hold of a copy.
Hum Of Gnats Review
poisucevamachenille review
