VipCancro is the Italian group comprising Andrea Borghi, Alberto Picchi (electronics), Filippo Ciavoli Cortelli (percussion), and Nicola Quiriconi. We noted a copy of their 2010 outing Tropico and enjoyed the “throbbing, meandery gloom” which the threesome were capable of creating at that time. Today’s release UNO (LISCA RECORDS LISCA 015) contains three recordings from 2015 and 2016, one of which appears to have been captured at the Venice Biennale. I mention this because I’m intrigued by the amount of “audience noise” which has seeped onto the tape, and in the case of the first long track seems to have as much presence and importance as the music itself. Weirdly, said audience sound also appears on the studio cuts, for reasons I cannot fathom. Maybe it’s been ported across on tape. In fact it’s not so much audience noise as art-gallery ambience, a kind of extra space in the music, the voices of bored and disaffected art consumers wandering by as they wheel their uninterested children around the resonant space. In this charged atmosphere, VipCancro’s music appears to be an intervention of some sort; they’re not trying to be unobtrusive and remain unnoticed, but at the same time it’s hard to know when the performances start and end. The music is one more feature in an interesting sonic field, and rendered somewhat diffuse in the process. In fact, it’s hard to say who is playing what, or even what instruments might be involved. All of this is fascinating, producing a listening experience that is strangely compelling in ways I can’t quite understand. They might be trying to undermine the traditional concept of recorded improvisational works in some way. There’s a real sensitivity to acoustics and timbres, a sense of space, and not just of musicians invading the arena to demonstrate their prowess and performing abilities. From 4th May 2017; many thanks to Nicola Quiriconi who sent this from Lucca.
Nicola Quiriconi also sent us the self-titled record by Daimon (Metzger Therapie #003), a new trio project to which he adds his voice to the guitar and electronics of Paulo Monti (from The Star Pillow) and the electronics of Simon Balestrazzi, everyone’s favourite of occult-flavoured drone atmospheres. Released by the German label Metzger Therapie, who describe Daimon as an “obscure deep-drone audio-visual” project, which may mean they screen movies during performances. Bound to appeal to fans of Zoviet France, who often created similarly intense and smothering episodes of fogged-out blank drone with a highly sinister edge. Daimon work best for me when the voice elements, subtly added and edging into our consciousness, are blended with the electronic noise in a creepy and discomfiting manner. Only one track ‘Take The Telescope and Go’ makes any concessions to audience pleasure with its soothing ambient currents; the remainder is dark, abstract, and slow explorations of ghostly zones. The titles ‘A Call’, ‘He’s Seeing You’ and ‘Almost Blind’ imply all manner of unseen entities and phantoms around us, surveilling our actions and attempting to contact us from beyond the grave. From 4th May 2017.