Technical Quartet Industries
Radiocomet

Dig dig, in the immense and labyrinthine world of independent productions that were a single flash extinguished in the blink of an eye, in the end, you always find something incredibly interesting. In the '80s, tons of cassettes were produced - in Italy and elsewhere - full of ideas and good intentions, as well as high hopes. Who doesn't have demo tapes of their youth band or some mysterious band recommended by a friend at home? There are those who still have boxes of tapes made more or less artisanal. Among them, you sometimes find authentic rarities of names that later became famous. Or rarities of names that remained buried forever but did something incredible at that moment.

This is the case with these Technical Quartet Industries, pointed out to me by a musician contact who managed to hear all the tracks online (see notes at the bottom of the review). I take the trouble to review a demo with six tracks, released in only 30 copies back in 1987, because this music was incredible. When they say someone is "ahead"... well, these guys were way ahead. And the thought that they disappeared into nothingness, at least as a project with this name, says a lot about how the dynamics of the music market evolve. If these guys had encountered the right and forward-thinking management, they would have been pre-Sigur Ros and much more.

The demo seems shabby, with a cover in paper now macerated, but the audio quality is decent though crackling. The graphics are not particularly original, also because the quartet was not made of pretty faces like a boyband, except for Miss Paulette. However, the packaging is relative, at most it's interesting as an example of the trend of those times. The musical content is what raises your antennas and not only those.

The album starts with the main title track, which is a slow hypnotic mantra over which Paulette's voice weaves chilling cosmic litanies. Wailing litanies with an alien charm. Highly refined sounds, rhythm in the style of things that would become fashionable at least three or four years later, incomprehensible lyrics, yet they seem to tell you something mysterious and cursed. In the following tracks, the young woman's voice alternates with that of a man - it's unknown which of the three - leaving space for more cavernous and rarefied atmospheres. But the mood remains the same. "Plastic ego" and "Void mirror" are prototypes of drone-music ahead of their time. And the rest of the tracks are no less.

When I think about the electronic and industrial scene of that precise period, I focus on a few bands doing similar things. The point is, they did it in a more imprecise, artisanal way, advancing somewhat gropingly. Also, the sound quality was dirtier, the ideas persistent and repetitive. Here, instead, you perceive a clarity of objectives, and the level of production is very high.

Some of the Technical Quartet Industries' work has appeared on YouTube in flashes. Until some time ago, the entire demo was available, then it disappeared as they deleted the channel. But you can still find a little something to get an idea. A copy of the cassette is currently valued at high figures, either because it is genuinely rare or because it truly deserves to be preserved and passed on to posterity.