Aspec(t) Zalaski are a fairly demented trio of frenzied players…the drummer is Polish performer Andrzej Zaleski who we have heard adding his percussive skills to the Fingerprints album by Mirt (CAT SUN, 2013). He’s joined by the young Italian electro-acoustic genius Mimmo Napolitano, who records and performs as SEC_, here wielding his reel-to-reel tape recorder in unorthodox fashion and belching out samples from his evil desktop boxes. We know SEC_ of old, as part of the Strongly Imploded group, and with his fine solo records such as Outflow and Moscaio. Fellow Italian Mario Gabola – also a member of Strongly Imploded – comes our way from Salerno where he runs Viande Records, sometimes to release his own brand of home-made electronic noise; his innovation here is to use a “self-built photosensitive system”, a device which is most intriguing, and may work on the same principles as Daphne Oram’s Oramics.
On Droga (MONOTYPE RECORDS MONO097), this threesome turn in 19 short tracks manifesting their craft; restless, sputtery, and disjointed noise is their stock-in trade, and they sometimes find they can say all they want in less than a minute, although admittedly the majority of their exploits find them sustaining the energy-burst past the envied two-minute mark without pausing for breath. Zaleski’s wild vocalising is one of many high spots; he gasps and gibbers like an enthused Neanderthal man let loose in the saber-tooth shopping mall, and his mad drumming gives many a lurching jolt to the trio’s work, effectively shoving them off the edge of a cliff. The two Italians are capable of settling into workaday fizz and burbling, but they occasionally manage to send up a firework of whoopy, screechy noise.
An exhausting listen; maybe this is what happens when fourth-generation punk rock meets up with improvised noise. From 21st January 2016.