Massimo Pupillo from Zü has lent his skills to a number of esoteric and off-track projects of late, including the Coil “supergroup” This Immortal Coil. With his darkish leanings, he’s just right for this project called Fragments (UNSOUNDS 79U), providing his musical backdrops for the poems of Gabriele Tinti, recited here by Roger Ballen.
I think the source for most of the work here is a book called The Earth Will Come To Laugh And To Feast, published a few years ago in New York, to showcase Tinti’s texts with photo-images by Ballen; four such Ballen images reappear here on the panels of the digipak, black-and-white art photos showing a certain preoccupation with human limbs, especially feet and toes, gazing at them relentlessly. If there’s an underlying theme to this curious release, it might come from Tinti’s conceptual vision, reaching deep into ancient history, and his speculative notions about the nature of early man, in regard to rituals, rites, and ceremonies. The more blood sacrifice and animal bones involved the better; Tinti strives to re-imagine himself back into the space of what he calls a “primordial cave”, hoping to evince sensations of terror and the unknown; in all our years of so-called civilisation, he might suggest, mankind has done little more than re-enact these cultish practices, with signs daubed on the walls and “simulacra” of human bodies
The connection with Roger Ballen’s stark, uncompromising images seems fairly clear; Massimo Pupillo, lui, can’t do much more than provide unsettling dark-ambient sounds and corrupted Kosmische keyboards to advance these themes, but he does have a stab at creating a soundtrack for Ill Wind, apparently a 1972 movie created by the New York-born Roger Ballen. In all, the set can be reckoned as a successful meeting of minds and confluence of ideas; while I found the overall tone a little solemn and self-important at first, thankfully it never tips over into outright hysteria. Those involved adopt a stoic attitude to the ancient horrors they have glimpsed, each interpreting them by their own lights and expressing them in their own manner. (02/01/2024)