Sunday, December 14, 2008

M.B + E.D.A: Regolelettroniche

M.B. + E.D.A., it seems, are made up of two Italians on either side of the generational divide — Maurizio Bianchi, an elder statesman of the Italian experimental scene, and solo noisenik Emanuela De Angelis, twenty years his junior. Though the two share roots in noise, together De Angelis and Bianchi retire to gentler pastures on Regolelettroniche, their first LP as a duo, trafficking in a kind of muted, cyclic noise, a language of soporific repetition limited in its range and sure in its execution.

A set of rules the two came up with, apparently, were the basis for this collaboration, an unspoken framework the two call ‘ruletronics’, a system whose provenance is as uncertain as the resulting drones are beautiful, all wondering about whatever conceptual arrangement arrived at these experiments moot once you actually hear them.

‘Universal Order’, the record’s third track, trades in the same grainy greys as Belong’s excellent October Language, but is even more static, allowing each loop to bend, warp, expand and contract until each beginning is lost in its end. In this sense, much of Regolelettroniche speaks the same tones as William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, the songs gaining direction and movement from staying in one place and revealing their shadows and lights, content to play without anything resembling conventional songform.

‘Cosmic Norms’, the record’s 25-minute centrepiece and undeniable highlight, is a gorgeous, shifting wash of oceanic noise that shows Bianchi and De Angelis, for all their rules, very clearly of one mind. As elsewhere on the record, ‘Cosmic Norms’ sees only a few phrases given voice, but each are stretched and unfurled in a way that they never outstay their welcome. De Angelis and Bianchi play with the kind of sonics that displace normal notions of time, progression and order, replacing them with something simpler, truer even.

Originally published here.

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