Being Eaten By Noise

Lorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist from Torino in Italy who has spent the past couple of years engaged in an intense study of what he refers to as “three key concepts for the artist: breathing, amplification, and movement” (as per the album’s inner sleeve). This is the fourth “act” of that study, which began with Flag Day Recordings’ Disincarnazione in 2023. From the very beginning, it is a seriously intense listen. The word “immersive” gets bandied about a lot in music writing these days, but Mess (Akt IV) is a positively engulfing experience. Which is to say that putting it on feels rather a lot like being eaten.

The music on this tape represents part of a concert given by Hugh Davies and David Toop at Riverside Studios, London, on 15th July 1978. The music was improvised without prior discussion. Hugh Davies plays mainly amplified found and home-made instruments; David Toop plays (on this occasion) mostly acoustic found and home-made instruments as well as more conventional flutes, fiddles, etc. The fact that this duo has not worked together often combined with the differences in approach and types of sound-producing technology highlights a quality of so-called free improvisation. The structure of the music derives from an immediate listening interaction rather than from externals such as composition, choice of instruments, cosmic schemes, preferred mode of dress and so forth.

SURVIVAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES
At the very beginning of Survival Research Laboratories in 1978, the group’s founder Mark Pauline predicted that people would eventually start building their own technology in order to seize control of the very violence that characterizes the age we live in. Survival Research Laboratories was conceived and founded by Mark Pauline in November 1978. Since its inception, SRL has operated as an organization of creative technicians dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations. Since 1979, SRL has staged over 50 mechanized presentations in the United States, Europe and Japan, each performance consisting of a unique set of ritualized interactions between robots and other machines. Humans are present only as operators and audience members.