open mind

a concert truly of concrete music!!!

I remember years ago (in '98 or '99) at the link in Bologna, they played for 5 hours straight ironically calling the concert "the eternal soundcheck," which would also become the name of one of their albums.

they're called sinstri now
just like this album........they don’t have many live dates....I know they played in Bologna in October.....anyway, if you’re still interested, this is their website: www.sinistri.org

A nonsensical masterpiece??? If only all nonsensical masterpieces were like this.... Of course, it's not on the level of "Requiem for a Dream" or even "The Delirium Theorem," but it's definitely (de gustibus, obviously) a beautiful film that showcases the visionary talent of the director. The soundtrack, well described by Mariaelena, is really well done. Regular Requiem for a Dream is a bit too music video-like simply because Aronofsky comes from music videos, that's all.

The original idea was to create a rock and roll record (and by rock and roll, I mean the early days and all those moments when it returns to a certain primal immediacy and brutal simplicity), essentially: repetition (a constant time, an obsessive bass line, a riff, two or three chords, a few phrases). More than an album, I intended to make a documentary about a rock and roll record, or better yet: a documentary about a band playing rock and roll. The twelve tracks of Infrantumi are nothing but this. Infrantumi abandons the idea of composition from the very beginning; the musician is not someone who creates, decides, and coordinates a musical structure (we reject the concept of music as structure); he merely triggers mechanisms for the music to compose itself (music as process). For this to be allowed, the musician must necessarily step back and limit every sort of intention as much as possible (destruction of the self vs. self-representation); only silence is devoid of intention (learning to be silent). In Infrantumi, we do not find a personalization of the creative will carried out through the use of machines (which are never truly automatic but respond to a logic imposed by man), but rather through the use of what I consider maximally devoid of intention: silence. The musician simply decides how much silence there should be between one sound event and another (an event that, by repeating itself identically, becomes insignificant at this point); the musician plays the silence (furthermore, he always plays in relation to silence, not listening to the other instruments). All the rhythmic sections (bass, guitar, drums) were constructed in this way; in some tracks, collective improvisations (intuitive music) were layered on top to restore a certain degree of naturalness and immediacy that I believe are characteristic of rock and roll. To limit the possibilities of self-representation as much as possible (unfortunately so dear to improvisers), we used deliberately out-of-tune guitars (one should reflect on this last term, guitars with memory!?), difficult-to-control analog synthesizers, and unreliable percussion; the microphone was placed randomly in various points of the room; we also used different techniques to alter our psychophysical condition. From a strictly musical point of view, we attempted to make our interventions as un-spectacular as possible (thus more parasitic noise than chords, rhythms, or scales); personally, I always began to play without having any idea of what to do, focusing more on the sound-check of the instrument rather than harmonic or rhythmic sequences. I want to emphasize that the Starfuckers are nonetheless a group that, by tradition, technique, and culture, refers exclusively to rock and roll (in short, we are not capable of playing). As for the lyrics, which I wrote in a couple of days, I referred exclusively to images that I had memorized during the recording sessions; in a certain sense, they do nothing but comment on the music, essentially: the captions of a documentary. I realize that this whole process is nothing but a compositional technique; the individual tracks, once recorded and thus in a certain way written, could be easily performed just as they came out, but this does not interest us... this is Infrantumi...

I've seen the starfuckers live countless times, they’re from my province. And each time it’s a revelation. I’ll share a few lines (maybe a bit more!!) about the creative process behind Sinistri (they're crazy, no doubt! But around here, everyone is crazy!):
...Sinistri, at least in intention, aimed to encapsulate within its seven tracks some of the most significant compositional techniques of this century: twelve-tone, serialism, minimalism, modal jazz, aleatory music, concrete and electroacoustic, making these techniques assimilable to the simple and repetitive structure of rock and roll while simultaneously being accessible at an experiential level to musicians either voluntarily or involuntarily equipped with a limited technical background (a rock band); Infrantumi, on the other hand, seeks to explore something completely new. In the three years between Sinistri and Infrantumi, I researched a compositional technique that would be as close as possible to the traditional process with which a rock band composes a song: during rehearsals in a rehearsal space; basically, I was searching for a generative principle, akin to the blues pentatonic scale, that would allow me to produce rock and roll tracks almost automatically. Moreover, I wanted this principle to force me, as a musician, to operate as minimally as possible and especially to let go of intention. I found such a generative principle in silence (or emptiness), or rather in the violent and disintegrative function that silence can assume. The strategic use of silence allowed us to overcome those taboos that we consider absolutely harmful to what we regard as music. With this record, we aim to: transcend the taboo of music as structure to elaborate it as process; transcend the taboo of synchronicity; transcend the taboo of tuning; free ourselves of our own (musical) ego. Thus, it’s about transcending not every limit, but the very idea of limit...

great recognition of a great group. I've always liked the cerberus shoal.....

one word: mdma.Simply perfect

they are over the top. from manowar I don't expect anything...! Even though the first two albums are clearly superior to american don at least for my ragged ears.

Ah, and sorry, I think there's an approach to post-rock sounds. Or maybe to put it better, a more precise blend than in the previous Isis albums. In short, this record is post-everything. The term post-hc no longer holds meaning given the diversity of bands that fall under this genre.