Images of musicians sitting static behind a laptop lack a certain something. It’s not drama per se, or simply movement. It just doesn’t infer music. There are some arty back and white shots of drummer, percussionist and electroacoustic composer Alessio Riccio in the booklet that accompanies the CD, serious, bearded and bespectacled behind a mixing desk, behind a laptop, and even working on two laptops simultaneously. There’s another on the back cover where he looks like he’s resting on a giant pair of sculpted metal tits, but I assume it’s some kind of percussive instrument.
Riccio’s essay, ‘On Immersivity’ sheds some light on his creative practices and general approach to music and composition. In referencing impenetrable post-structural theorist Fèlix Guaratti, who contended that a schizophrenic mindset was the only sane response to the madness of the postmodern world, alongside Marx, Mario Gamba and Umberto Eco, Riccio makes it clear that his music has a strong theoretical context and is as much, if not more of an intellectual exercise, as an endeavour designed to tantalise the aural receptors.
Using laptop, and various other devices, and with the input of Hasse Poulson, Monica Demuru and Catherine Jauniaux, Riccio creates a jolting cacophony that lurches between scratchy drones, bleeping electronica and wild free jazz – and often overlays the three simultaneously.
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Breakbeats and manic percussive assaults, psychotic shouting, frenzied yelping, barking and stuttering, ominous whispers, heavy sonorous bottom-end drones, squalling feedback, oscillations and disintegrations, scrapes and all kinds of unnamed and unmentionable manias are leaping around in the bag, spilling multitudinous shades of noise here there and everywhere.
As mashed-up, cut-up audio collages go, ‘NINSHUBAR’ is one of the most challenging and chaotic. There are moments where the sheer incompatibility of the myriad elements, the clashing sounds and general disorder is almost unbearable, but there are, equally, moments of sheer brilliance which are inspired and inspirational, an those moments definitely justify the listener’s patience.
Alessio Riccio Online
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