My Bloody Valentine
Live @ Orion, Roma 29.05.13

THE REVIEW

The avant-garde essence of a live noise performance reveals itself in a double negation. The gaze of the viewer is stripped of its usual role; the paying audience is not asked to witness the work that fades and of which, by the end of the evening, no trace will remain; their presence—and the band's looking elsewhere is an unequivocal sign from the start—is, for the execution, entirely contingent.

Denying the otherness of the audience, the band cannot but also deny itself at the same time: the guitars venture into the shadows on the outskirts of the stage, bass and drums are sucked into the maelstroms of visual effects (people, shouting "Voice!" in annoyance, manifest all their discomfort in confronting performers who have become deindividualized); at the same time, throughout the performance, there's a progressive destruction of the Text, in subtler ways compared to, for example, jazz improvisation: it's true, they follow a canonical setlist, but the execution no longer refers to the track as a separate existence, there is no appeal to its character of "repeatable materiality" originally inscribed in a CD, the attempt, instead, is to foreground sound as a pure hic et nunc event: the spectator, continually entering and exiting moments, violent, of "acoustic blow-up," is forced to lose, each time, the reference to the "track title" (just as, in mantras, a word repeated obsessively sheds its meaning to become a mere sound occurrence).

In the finale, the holocaust of feedback celebrates the success of such demolition: an audience that is no longer an audience, artists to whom what happens is no longer even ascribable, the score reduced to shreds, but, at the same time, the space of the representation has expanded, from the stage, to encompass the entire room, and someone covers their ears or, exhausted, retreats to the corners.

In vain: there is noise everywhere.