Be Invisible Now! - "Sequantizercha"

Be Invisible Now! is the solo project of Marco Giotto from Italy. During the nineties he has played in several different bands from guitar improv (Apple Pillar) to hardcore (Cheswick). Giotto has also recorded guitar sessions for Italian post-hardcorists With Love (now on GSL Records) for their album "I Love Cul The Sac" in 1999. His latest experience in a band is from 2001 with d.EVIL, a deviant hard-psyche band turned recently to garage-noise-rock.

Giotto’s first solo work as Be Invisible Now! was the self-titled 2002 ep featuring two long tracks where he clearly marks the influence of his recent passions for the cosmic couriers and the anologue electronics recorded in the mid seventies from bands such as early-era Tangerine Dream, Kluster/Cluster but also the sonic research of Dick Raaijmakers and more recently Sonic Boom.

Giotto is also a member of the Be Maledetto Now! project, a duo of him and Nihil Is Me/Maledetto (With Love guitarist Andrea Giotto). They have a split cassette out on the micro.label 8mm Recs/Long Long Chaney and a partecipation on the DVD compilation "Infinite Mind" released by 8mm Recs/Canedicoda.

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Horisont - "Två Sidor Av Horisonten"

HORISONT's debut album revives the sounds of 70's heavy classic rock. The mix of classic rock, progressive, blues and psychedelic brings the mind back to the days of Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath and November. The wha-wha, fuzz, slide, double riffs, thunderous drums and a killer voice, it's all here.

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nmperign _ Günter Müller - "More gloom, more light"

01. More light. (15:47)
02. And the gloom of that light (5:36)
03. More gloom. (9:48)
04. And the light of that gloom (7:16)

Greg Kelley: Trumpet
Bhob Rainey: Sax
Günter Müller: MDs, Selected Percussion, Electronics

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Luca Sigurtà - "La Vera Macchina D'Argento"

"La Vera Macchina D'Argento" (...or "The Real Silver Machine", if you prefer...) was composed and recorded in 2003 using many different sources/instruments such as broken/faulty discs, environmental/field-recordings, guitars, percussions, various objects and self-built devices.

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Blind Jesus - "Blind Jesus"

Blind Jesus by Andrew L. Hooker and Stefano Pilia debuts with a record that, according to this writer, is one of the best works of avant-rock heard recently: unravelled stuttering in the vein of Storm & Stress fall from crumbling gorges of tape loops, caracoling flights in the foreground interrupted with improvised retro-folk, wanton porno-concrète jokes arm-in-arm with strained ecstatic drones, followed by melancholic acoustic crackling, industrial creaking, soulful moans, obstacular Supreme Dicks style songs... The duo's language is to some extent recognizable "in the style of", but these five tracks improvised with tapes, guitar, samples and effects are sewn together and assembled with a rare sense of fantasy.

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John Duncan / Zeitkratzer "Fresh"

The zeitkratzer ensemble performing two tracks by John Duncan in a collaboration promoted last year by Podewil in Berlin. A project started over a year ago, the result of continuous and tenatious work over several meetings between Duncan and the musicians, in charge of performing two originally electronic compositions with their acoustic instruments.

The 27 minutes of the first piece revisit NAV-FLEX, a composition published last year by Duncan in the double CD with Francisco López, NAV . In zeitkratzer's hands the piece seems to acquire new life, maintaining the positive qualities in Duncan's original work: those high, obscure phantom sounds, that slow pulsing bass, those extremely suggestive drones, slow and gradual waves that expand throughout the entire space of the mind and body, measuring full and empty.

Managing to frame an ungraspable track such as NAV-FLEX and perform it as a piece for acoustic instruments was a theoretical challenge, a challenge clearly won, resulting in complex sound full of detail, giving extremely diverse effects at all volume levels. What's striking is the richness of the tonal range, the continuous hastening of the instruments, the expansions in the sustained notes. This is a cyclic, insistent work that takes form through echoes and rumbles, a silent becoming of chimerical sounds. Sublime in the capturing of a stillness with night-like flavor, through low and enshrouding notes, gradations of a matter that is something 'other' from us, sublimated in slow passages of beauty. The reciprocal hastening of the instruments, the diffuse persussive articulation, the rustling and the breathing, the soft touches: without knowing how, we find ourselves surrounded by a dreamlike matter that undermines and deforms every normal perceptive coordinate.

TRINITY is an older work, included in the 1996 compilation A Fault In The Nothing : short, grating and stinging compared to NAV-FLEX. A crescendo of striated chords that explodes in rapid, stabbing movments of sound, just as effective as the first track although in an opposite direction. If the first was all a compact stirring, TRINITY is an explosion in a thousand splinters, marked by brass rhythms and beats of the string instruments, composed by refrained clusters of notes, that die in a single breath of three minutes.

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Désormais "Climate Variations"

Désormais, a French adverb meaning “from now on,” is an apt ­ if somewhat oblique - tag for the collaboration between Mitchell Akiyama and Joshua Treble. Begun in the fall of 2001, the resulting album, Climate Variations, is the product of mundane exchanges - sound file uploads, emails, phones calls, cdr’s, etc. Despite the distance between the two musicians, both real and virtual (Akiyama is based in Montreal, Joshua Treble (aka Tony Boggs) in Cincinnati), the result is a total communion of personal styles and aesthetics.

Located somewhere between the drone rock of My Bloody Valentine and the glitch-scapes of Christian Fennesz, Climate Variationsis a mosaic of guitar shards, piano fragments, field complaints and borderline copyright infringements. It is a sublime and sometimes jarring work that is as captivating in its intricacy as it is in its raw emotional power.

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