Supersilent
13

Honestly, I don't know how true this thing is. Even if it doesn't matter. My father told me about it, and he probably read it in a newspaper at the time or saw some interview on television, and in fact I'm not really interested in knowing how true it is or not. The story concerns the making of 'Once Upon a Time in America' (1984) by Sergio Leone. It seems that during the filming, Sergio Leone 'forced' the actors to perform with the background music that Ennio Morricone had composed for the film. Practically with the soundtrack in the background. The intent of this type of operation is clear: Sergio Leone wanted all the characters in the film to be somehow emotionally deeply 'marked' by that extraordinary soundtrack, which literally had to permeate what would be their acting. A soundtrack whose famous main theme is practically whistled daily by my father, who considers it his main 'theme', along with the main theme of 'Serpico'. Moreover, I would like to seize this opportunity to tell something else significant about my father. When you sing, I mean, if you start humming and whatever you're humming in his presence, rest assured, he will always and in any case start to sing and sing louder than you.

I still don't know how true this thing about the making of 'Once Upon a Time in America' is. The thing, however, is at least plausible. Moreover, I'm sure the history of cinema is full of such examples and that this 'strategy' is regularly applied even today. Perhaps today more than yesterday. I don't know. Not to mention then the fact that there are a lot of films that are based exclusively on their soundtrack, which takes on a dominant role in what the director intends to convey to his viewers. Recently, for example, I saw at the cinema the latest film by the Copenhagen director, Nicolas Winding Refn, 'The Neon Demon'. I don't get into the overall quality of the film, but it is evident that it would practically make no sense without the particular use of lights and sounds, of the soundtrack, as usual composed by that great master of music Cliff Martinez. Among other things, this is certainly not the first time Refn has worked this way on one of his films. He is a director who is evidently used to directing his films in a conceptual manner based more on the use of lights (neon and blinding lights, in the case of 'The Neon Demon') and especially music, rather than real images and dialogues.

Moreover, there are also musicians who compose their music in a way that we could define as figurative. As if they were painting 'watercolors' (Bonnie 'Prince' Billy) or as if they were recording soundtracks for films (Luke Haines - 'British Nuclear Bunkers'). Not only. Obviously, there are a lot of cases where there are more or less direct interactions and intersections between different arts. It's something inevitable. It always happens. By necessity.

So when I first heard '13' (Smalltown Supersound), the latest album by Supersilent, the avant-garde music ensemble formed in Bergen, Norway, during the nineties, it immediately reminded me of one of my many never-completed projects. In this case, it would be a literary work of science fiction set in space and in which the protagonists are astronauts from the United States of America (or partly also from Europe) and in a crew composed partly of military and partly of civilians. They are aboard an innovative and experimental spaceship for several characteristics that I won't explain here, named 'Pausania', and have to complete a mission - mostly for propaganda purposes - in which they are to make a circular orbit around the planet Mars and then return to Earth, after passing straight in the middle of the planet's two asteroids, Deimos and Phobos. At this point, in a situation where everything must necessarily be perfect, something happens. It is assumed that the astronauts are people trained for every type of situation and stress and with an important amount of knowledge of all kinds and not just scientific, thus prepared for everything, yet something starts to go wrong in these people who are expected to be a sort of perfect machines, automatons, and a kind of autistic geniuses and where instead emerge forcefully individual traits on a more or less emotional level. Without telling the whole story, let's say it's a sci-fi story and a psychological thriller, but at the same time also a sort of social analysis of the mentality and social structures of the Western world. Unfortunately, this story does not exist. I mean, it exists, but I never continued to write it, so it currently exists only in my head.

When I wrote it, when I wrote most of this story and then didn't continue, I was in a state of hallucination. I was in Barcelona in December four or five years ago, on the occasion of what was then the last edition of the Primavera Club. I don't remember much of my stay, because at that time I was completely 'insane'. I caught a fever the day before leaving (I don't remember ever having had a fever before that time among other things) and although I still spent all my time around (note a great performance by the usual Michael Gira with his Swans), the last day before departure I was completely knocked out. So I stayed in the hostel and started writing. I wrote without stopping. I wrote pages and pages without stopping as I have never done in my entire life before then and after, and, by the way, I didn't tell you before, but clearly, perhaps because I felt somehow 'isolated' from my altered state due to the fever, I imagined the story in a way that more than figurative, would have had to constitute an expressive audio-visual experience, a manifestation both sound and visual of hallucinations and for this necessarily accompanied by an avant-garde experimental and at the same time 'spatial' soundtrack. Noisy as the void of space. Basically, ultimately, what I mean is that probably the Supersilent (Arve Henriksen, Helge Sten aka Deathprod, and Starle Storlokken) didn't know when they recorded this album (which would then be a collection of material recorded over the years), the first since drummer Jarle Vespestad left the group, that this was exactly the soundtrack of my story. Yet that's exactly how things are.

The album was recorded in two different live performances, then mastered by the same Helge Sten and composed of nine songs (scientifically numbered from 1 to 9) that could be very generically defined as free-improvisation, even if this definition is not entirely accurate to me because the research and intended experimentation work behind this work is evident.

We are obviously talking about an album that can only be appreciated if one manages to contextualize it in a concrete way and in a concrete context or otherwise immersing oneself, during listening, in some dimension that does not necessarily have to be physically existing and can perfectly well be imaginary. There are electronic and noise musical compositions like '13.1' and '13.3', practically distorted and cacophonic re-editions of Kraftwerk's music; ambient music with glacial atmospheres ('13.8.') or otherwise so solemn and serious in tone as to suggest the solitude of individualities of individuals in the so complex context of our society or maybe, why not, in deep space ('13.2'). But the Supersilent probably show all their qualities in those avant-garde episodes that then become long jazzy and noisy and at the same time obsessive sessions like '13.5', drone and acidic, sketched like the images of an old TV that doesn't receive the signal ('13.7'), or as in the case of '13.9', the ideal single of the album, like explosions of different types of sound that shoot flashes at the speed of light until they shine brightly inside our heads. I'm talking about sounds and modular sound compositions that personally I have not heard in any of the records released recently and that as far as I'm concerned make this album, consequently, one of the fundamental episodes of this year 2016.

For the rest, maybe someone might be interested in how the story of 'Pausania' ends and what mysterious fate awaits its crew of astronauts, but it would be out of context to continue talking about it and telling this story. Let's just say that a space shuttle, despite having limited space, constitutes necessarily also a small model of society, especially if we are talking about a mission that requires more time, maybe a month or two, to be completed. Every type of society, it's known, however, it is structured and whatever its size, it requires compromises and rules that are common to all members who are part of it. Therefore, what we can define as a balance. And this type of process, which is an unwritten rule, can be applied to a society and any community, but in the same way also to the individual amidst his different emotional and/or intellectual urges and consequently at this point also to space and what we call the cosmos, the entire universe. In this sense, there is then no difference between the individual and what we can define as 'everything'. What was the big bang, after all, if not an avant-garde composition just like those that make up this album here, like the music of Supersilent. A free manifestation of creation. An act of creative will. Some speak of free-improvisation, it's a nice definition, but the feeling in reality is that these forces that act, that these manifestations of energy, know exactly how to move and what to do.