Borbetomagus
Barbed Wire Maggots

Preamble:

I put this album on the PC after lunch and a friend walked into the room who, after a few seconds, exclaimed:

"What is this?"

"It's music."

"(laughs), but what kind of music is it?"

"Jazz..."

"What are you talking about...??! This is just a racket of guitars, they don't know how to play..!"

and he leaves the room laughing and covering his ears.

The Borbetomagus are an extreme collective of extreme jazz, a musical group (!!!?) devoted to noise improvisation on a free jazz base where metallic clangs and screeches of guitar coexist with roaring and boisterous vitriolic sax solos, caws, and spits.

A fierce grand-guignolesque sarabande in which virtuosity, instrumental technique, and a taste for melody are rejected, vandalized, and raped by obscene screams, lurid and sinister.

The album consists of a long forty-minute track arbitrarily divided into two movements, where it is difficult if not impossible to find a logical thread within the compositions; it feels like witnessing a long improvisation where the musicians compete to see who can create the greatest bewilderment and sensory fog.

Their goal is to knock out the unsuspecting listener under tons and tons of layered noise, deafening roars, and ultra-cacophonic experimentalism.

Listening to their cannibalistic stagings brings to mind "Tetsuo – The Iron Man," a film by Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, in which society is depicted as an industrial reality, extremely degraded and destructive, where black and white blend to create a violent, impressionist gray, where the ferocity of the claustrophobic shots evoked by that film can appear to many as an insensate and deliberately macabre or excessively negative picture of things.

But that personally is part of my vision of life, which often turns out to be senseless, devoid of any emotion, and governed by futile and purposeless gestures. Existence is conceived and unfolds through "random" situations that you cannot govern, which man is forced to endure whether willing or not.

It is impossible to classify the avant-garde of Borbetomagus, just as it is impossible to classify everyday life, the senselessness of the things that happen to you day by day; it is a mirror that reflects your image incompletely because it does not take into account the myriad nuances, reality appears cold and distant and tends to shape entities increasingly conformed, anesthetized, and deprived of an authentic and genuine soul, but rather mostly contrived and constructed.

The music of Borbetomagus, like Tsukamoto's film, is a faithful mirror of everyday reality. Of the senseless gestures that are performed, the urban neuroses, and the catastrophic loneliness in which man finds himself in our days.

In their own way avant-garde and pioneers of a reality that clashes with the definition of humanity in the most positive sense of the term.