Cryogenic Dispersal

"Cryogenic Dispersal" is the name of the album behind which stands the combo formed by Maurizio Bianchi / M.B. and Paolino Canzoneri: the first record to bring two different personalities of electronic music officially together. Maurizio Bianchi is considered a true pioneer of experimental electronics, and of industrial music in particular — an eclectic musician whose first sonic cry was heard in the 1980s, with a vast discography of cassettes, today extremely rare, and of vinyl and CDs still sought after by collectors and enthusiasts. Since then he has produced a series of tapes and albums, among them "Pavimo" in 2015, produced by Nostress Netlabel and issued in a limited edition of 100 copies. Paolino Canzoneri, in his experience as a non-musician (as he likes to define himself), has always travelled bold and never predictable musical territories: a full-circle sonic research through the sounds of modular synths and beyond. He too has numerous releases and collaborations with artists of various standing behind him.

"Cryogenic Dispersal" is the work of two minds which, like the tracks of a railway station, ran on parallel lines for a long time without ever meeting. Two lines that suddenly reached a metaphysical coincidence: the point where everything comes together and distance becomes a utopia. In four tracks and 72 minutes of music, Maurizio Bianchi and Paolino Canzoneri have made a record that holds the most intimate aspects of the human soul. Dark roads through the obscure shores of consciousness, desolate moors across which elements of the surrounding landscape take shape, giving colour and form to everything that is new and apparently abstract. Sonorities that evoke nature in movement, through a dynamism generated by a play of light and shadow. Everything softens; the ground seems to give way underfoot, the echo of a scream inside a chasm at the centre of the earth, and then it settles, and there is readjustment, and silence.

Maurizio Bianchi comments on the album in strong, clear words: "An imposing album between electronic asperities and electrostatic lashes. The titles of the four tracks are an excellent common denominator, since they carry the incidental nature of events, and this further excommunicates the advocates of badly attended fatality. The music possesses a deep, disintegrating substance of purely metallized sound, with dense industrial nebulosities that amalgamate with synthetic expressive intensity." An intimate, intense record, absolutely worth hearing, made by two minds capable of catapulting the listener into unknown corners of the human mind.

The collaboration between Paolino Canzoneri and Maurizio Bianchi may seem unexpected, in some respects even unnatural. For anyone who knows the output of these two Italian electronic experimenters, as well as their respective sonic and cultural backgrounds, this record comes as an absolute surprise. In truth, listening to it with the attention it deserves, the impression grows that the junctions and consonances between Bianchi and Canzoneri, emotional ones above all, run deeper than one might believe. Although Canzoneri’s interventions on Bianchi’s dark sound are intelligible and recognisable, and vice versa, the amalgam between two inspirations only apparently hard to reduce to one another ends up prevailing, without, however, ever reaching a definitive summation, something programmatically foreign to the intentions of the two authors. The contradictions between approaches so deeply shareable in their respective structures never arrive at a synthesis, generating a negative dialectic, precisely without solutions, in which the failed reconciliation of opposites ends, practically, by crashing into nothing.

Hence a monumental, very long work that demands attentive, concentrated listening. Four exhausting pieces of around 18 minutes each, which crush the listener and drag them, in some ways gently, into a whirlpool that is hard to escape. The absence of ways out, the addition of worse to worse, irreversible disintegration as a teleologically negative, dystopian prospect, almost a political theology of dissolution: these, perhaps, are the expressions that best account for the post-human poetics adopted and developed by Bianchi and Canzoneri. Infinite sonic monoliths, static, without time or escape, envelop the listener, effectively preventing any return from the journey, any forgetting of the revelations impressed among pitch-black, disturbed frequencies, among gusts of cutting noise that, at high volume, risk truly hurting.

It is pointless, in fact, to dwell on the specific characteristics of each track. Suffice it to say that the opening of the work is already amply explanatory: a dronic ambient that admits no yielding without, however, being extremist. A measured intransigence. A nihilism so programmatic as to lose every trace of aggression, ineluctable as it is. In the second movement, perhaps for the first time in Bianchi’s boundless discography, a sarcastically ingratiating beat creeps in, continuous and, in its sounds, contemporary, forming the backdrop to the iniquities and distortions of the historic author of milestones such as Symphony for a Genocide or Endometrio. The third track again sees a phrasing, so to speak, by Canzoneri acting as a repetitive, continuous and very effective background to Bianchi’s liturgies. Finally, with no catharsis or liberation, no explosions or changes that might suggest a chink of light, the last track lands the decisive blow. Not because it presents notable variations on what came before, but because it sanctions an incurable deterioration. That behind this far from easy sonic abyss, behind this drugless bad trip, there lies a metaphysical reflection on a loss of which nothing can be known, on an original lack whose absence Bianchi and Canzoneri have inexplicably decided to make themselves singers and witnesses of, is beyond doubt.

Pietro Maltese — BrusioNetLabel