The record Anni Di Masturbazione (ADAADAT ADA0044) is an album of shrill and intense digital noise by the Italian creator Venta Protesix. He freely owns himself a pervert, and advertises his preoccupations with masturbation, sexual violence, and dubious images of underage girls from Japanese comic books and hentai. Judging by the cover, he’s something of a narcissist also, poised midway in the act of transmitting a picture of himself across the web. His sullen expression is a testament to the joys of self-abuse.
The press notes seek to persuade us that Venta Protesix is at the spearhead of a new form of electronic noise called “laptop micro-autism” or “bruitist stochasticism”; no other proponents of these styles spring to my mind, but this may be because Venta also feels himself to be “alienated from all contemporary music scenes”. Not so alienated that he can’t make records though, and further examples of his craft can be found dating back to 2008, boasting titles such as Sensual Prostate Massage and Lolicon Noise Star. And if you think those titles are provocative, just wait till you see the tracklisting here; it’s enough to justify every parent’s worst nightmares about what they suppose their teenagers are doing on the Internet! I think this shows us something about the ways in way net porn can become so addictive, simply because it’s so fundamentally unsatisfying, and the user is compelled to keep returning for more, like a dog to its vomit.
At any rate, this record remains a thrilling listen on today’s spin, and where previously I found I couldn’t get past the completely repellent surface, today I’m sucking in the sheer narrow nastiness of it all like so much raspberry syrup. It’s already starting to make my favourite noise records feel “old school”, what with their slow speeds and their harsh walls and their lame attempts at composition; Venta Protesix just seems to blam it out on autopilot, presumably doing so while his right hand is busy pleasuring himself and simultaneously texting images of his penis to anyone who cares to view it. The closest thing we’ve recently heard to this crazed assault would be the music of CDR, i.e. Japanese loon Hikaru Tsunematsu, whose Acid Waltz was released by this same label; they share the same hyperactive and frenzied approach to noise, and possibly favour the use of small memory chips to inflict severely limited sounds on our sensitive eardrums.
Both CDR and Venta succeed in creating a grotesquely irritating racket, yet it remains compelling on some level. Mattin has also abused his laptop to create superficially similar ear-splitting results in terms of damaged datastreams, but his aims are entirely different, and his contempt for the audience is sourced from quite another reservoir of bile. From 12 October 2015.