INC002

Maurizio Bianchi / M.B.*
— Das Platinzeitalter — CD

sold out

1. Aurea Aetas
2. Die Erbsuende
3. Decadence
4. The Promised Seed
5. New Heavens New Earth
6. Das Platinzeitalter

Design – Meeuw
Electronics [Archaic Waves, Ancient Loops, Primitive Electronics] – Maurizio Bianchi
Electronics [Brackish Treatments] – Siegmar Fricke
Lute [Renaissance Lute] – Jozef van Wissem
Mastered By – PSE*

The mission has been terminated, once again. Without giving any reasons, Maurizio Bianchi has given up producing music. Of course, this is not the first time that Bianchi had ceased operations, as he famously disappeared from sight around 1984 after a frenzy of releases beginning around 1978. Those albums, in particular Symphony For A Genocide and The Plain Truth, as well as William Bennett’s antics on two early MB records released on Come Organisation, secured his status as a heavy weight of Industrial Culture alongside Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound, Ramleh, and Whitehouse; and the demonstrative cessation only served to buttress his mythology. But by the late ’90s, Bianchi began recording once again, gradually returning to the frenzied pace he set during his earlier peak of activity. Unfortunately, the new work has not always been up to snuff, as he didn’t seem to turn down any collaborative offer and didn’t seem too interested in the finer points of editing his content. BUT, there have been some real gems amidst the chaff. Hence, we announce Das Platinzeitalter. A quintessential Bianchi construction, this album meditates upon the minutiae of crumbling systems, returning to a common theme of Bianchi’s classic period — the cancerous body faced with a slow demise through ancillary pathogens. His sounds are blackened ambiences culled from stacked grey-smear loops and elongated ashen drones, some of which have been purported to originate from Jozef Van Wissem’s lute recordings, although you’ll be hard pressed to find anything lute-like in these shadowing sounds. Ominous. Grim. Foreboding. Oppressive. Neurotic. These are all apt descriptions to Bianchi’s best work; and those all apply here, but with the strange twist that this ambience is somewhat contemplative, as if Bianchi’s death-obsessed soundtrack is more of an enveloping invitation instead of a scream of horror.