Maurizio Bianchi & Maor Appelbaum - _Environmental Meditations_
(Topheth Prophet, 2006)
by: Quentin Kalis (8.5 out of 10)
"The hydrocephalic meditation comes from discriminatory incoherences in the minimized environment of mediatic insubstantiality. This work provides profitable logicality to the futuristic aversions, subjecting the deprecated brains marketing to an elitist unpretentiousness."

Judging from this extract from the CD booklet, this duo must have one extremely well paged thesaurus! Given that Maurizio Bianchi is an Italian noise music legend who has been in the business since 1979 (that's more years than I have been on this planet...) and has released over fifty titles, both solo and in collaboration with other artists, a little pretentiousness can be forgiven. His partner is Maor Appelbaum, an Israeli musician and producer who has been involved in Poochlatz, Vultures, IWR, Screening, Vectorscope and Plated Steel, amongst others!

This album is a mass of contradictions, starting with the title. The human brain and its workings appear to be the inspiration behind the title, and the music can perhaps be best described as noise ambient. This oxymoronic description obviously requires further elaboration. The music is noise in the sense that it consists largely of feedback and other disturbing sounds; however, their aim is not to overwhelm the listener with volley upon volley of anguished dissonance, but to draw him (or her) in through the use of highly repetitive yet effective motif, mesmerizing the listener in the manner of the best ritual ambient.

The music's strength is simultaneously its weakness, in that the listener has to be in the right frame of mind to listen to this album; it's not something that can just be tossed on the stereo after a hard day's slog. Regardless, this remains an album that demands to be listened to.

Contact: http://www.topheth.org

(article published 20/4/2007)


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