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Rating: Bologna Violenta is Nicola Manzan. By day, a quiet violinist and composer, having collaborated with the likes of Baustelle and Teatro degli Orrori, by night, a sort of musical cyber terrorist roaming the dark, rainy streets, spewing bile and sonic violence with unheard-of ferocity. Nights heavy with rain and shadows, somewhere between "Blade Runner" and German expressionism like "M" by Fritz Lang.
The chosen name obviously evokes the poliziottesco genre, and in various covers and spoken-sound inserts, he had directly referenced this specific genre in the past, but, at least in my opinion, cinematically it's not such a fitting parallel.
His music is much more diseased, unbalanced. The decline of society, the prevailing violence in language and action, was indeed present and shown raw even in various "Milano calibro 9", but in the project of Bologna Violenta, it becomes devastating, a soundtrack to a social catastrophe; in an apocalyptic climate, Nicola Manzan lays down a primal, punitive, and purifying force as the only way to initiate a "Newer World".
I’ll quickly mention two films that in my opinion better frame Bologna Violenta: "Eraserhead" the debut of David Lynch in 1977 and "Tetsuo", Tsukamoto's 1988 cyberpunk delirium where a man slowly transforms into a machine, a man of metal. Two profoundly diseased films that, if you've seen them, give you an idea of what this record is.
His approach is almost nihilistic, the music becomes noise and this noise, distorted to excess, with the peaks of the equalizer flattened at the top and bottom, covering everything, is a non-sound, it is nothingness; it is the end. There is no philosophy, narrative, hope, only destruction. We're talking about hardcore techno gunfire. No singing, a guitar, a drum machine, and brief spoken inserts that are supposed to give us a breather but that tell, sometimes thankfully with irony, of infanticides and genital transplants (Tetsuo, indeed). A noise vaguely related to Lightning Bolt and Melt Banana but here the noise is truly more primordial, an atavistic instinct seeing continuous sound explosions, samples of Mozart wrapped in distortion storms, a fury that scorches the earth and even bends the drum machine itself, driven "overclocked" in its desperate yet futile attempt to give logical time to the surrounding noise.
This is a mad cyber kamikaze full of TNT, with flesh penetrated by machines, as Cronenberg would like it. Recommended for your evenings spent in solitude, drinking sake and feeling extremely distant and disappointed by the human race.
PS The inserted sample does not refer to this album but is still a good example of Bologna Violenta.
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