Four decades of musical output has seen the Italian electronic legend ; Maurizio Bianchi’s music tread in both the shadow and the light. His brutally bleak and unforgiving early work as Sacher Pelz were a stark vision of dystopian isolation. The early loops and concrete drones the soundtrack of sanity slowly eroding. There was little if anything of humanity within those blunt tones, that despite being so minimal; seemed paradoxically to be insurmountable. Huge granite slabs of sound captured like mechanical demons onto the reels of cheap cassettes.
His later work as MB initially continued this exploration of decay and desolation but this time his own terror, horror and disgust at the modern world was transposed into the nightmarish vision. It’s almost as if you could glimpse a glance of him encased within the cavernous void a static scream upon his face; howling into the abyss. A howl of rage, of pain and of anger at the destruction of our humanity by the technocratic slavery that the whole of humanity was sleep walking towards.
This time Bianchi had taken solace in the light. He continued to work with the darkness but only in order to take a burning torch into the void. To illuminate that which for too long had subsumed to the gloom that dwells in all of our hearts.
C.M.E.R is an exploration of duality, an album that explores both darkness and light. An album that weaves a deftly spun web of both uplifting quasi classical synth work with bleaker more industrial tones.
C.M.E.R will please those who are interested in both the bleaker, harsher early years of this artists work and those who enjoy his more spiritual forays into sound art. It is a surprisingly powerful work consisting of both damnation and salvation.