ArtLexus
Blendergod

The few unsettling introductory notes of "Oshi" with its crooked keyboard and synth perfectly encapsulate the dominant reason that pushed Armando Greco, the sole mind behind the "Art Lexus" project, along the arduous path full of formidable challenges concerning the independent music world: spreading the word of absolute alienation and the lack of something to truly believe in.

These days it is really hard to believe, and Lexus knows this. That's why his music emerges from the Italian underground indie/rock/noise pot; his sonic textures are nothing but pale skeletons, circumstantial noises that are as venomous as they are suffering, telling without words (which would be incomprehensible to most) of stupid and maniacal broken dreams, few hopes destroyed and shattered in a matter of moments, throughout a lifetime. Nothing but suffering, intersected and therefore violated by the insensitive, menacing and inquisitive eyes of the "others."

Supreme judges on this Earth, even though it's not precisely known of what. The frenzy wave that runs through "Dissidents" perhaps, with its almost dub-like rhythm and the ever-constant electronic drumming, encapsulates a glimmer of an entire existence made of hardships and little else, the specter of inner-lived alienation that finds no reflection outside, devastated by the falsely hypocritical and stereotyped noise that destroys the human being as a singular entity willing to relate in a world where appearance matters more than anything, where to be or not to be merely equates to not existing, to castrating instincts, to realizing that maybe no, it's better to let go, even though the invisible enemy is present in each of us.

We are different and will remain different, misunderstandings will forever mark our vital pulse until that pulse becomes more and more unsteady, irrational, until it collapses and finally implodes upon itself.

Enter the noise-rock guitar in "Every other step" and it was missed, a jolt after the torpor, a breath of life flying far away, inhaled through the force of rock with few pretensions, other than trying to survive despite all the pressures, the calls, the neon signs glistening yet misleading more than ever. True naivety and adolescent spirit merge in all their essence, one cannot come out alive.

"Noise and Catharsis" is a mechanical beat, an hermetic and dissonant rustle that gives no respite. It's the soul demanding a way out, even if it doesn't exist.

The Lexusian word then extends with the nerve-wracking dissonances to the white noise of "Paths" and "Temptations", a wobbly intravenous of Sonic Youth's "Confusion Is Sex" period, the path of the New York No Wave of DNA and Mars proposed again and defragmented, vilified, afflicted, until it is reduced to an inaudible and unqualifiable sound. Acidity gradually softens, as if in that watercolor instead of red color there was real human blood, dark, now crystallized.

Much more obscure and disturbing is "Whirring Thoughts", the most compelling track of the bunch, between sound extremisms and experimentation, a bacchanal between Merzbow and Sunn 0)))'s drone music lasting four minutes, where Lexus's cacophony reaches unexpected heights of visionariness with the use of blenders, screwdrivers and various trinkets.

"Diploma" continues the exasperating path undertaken by the previous track, the cacophony becomes less physical and more mental, an exhausting and recalcitrant sound destined to fade during its two hundred forty seconds of vitriol.

The work closes with the mighty "Shiva", another experiment intended for the connoisseurs of Japanese noise: Hanatarash, Incapacitants, and Gerogerigegege blended inside a boiling cauldron, child of the most abrasive and harmful harsh noise for our already inflamed cerebral-auditory system.

What you will listen to during this "Blendergod," the Blender God, is an out-and-out experimentalism, indigestible, unhealthy, and dark, downright introspective.

Which pushes you to look "inside" yourself at the end of Art Lexus's anti-musical journey, to glimpse a light at the bottom of the black well of your souls.