Published by Alessandro Violante on February 4, 2017
If it’s certainly true several post-industrial releases are released in Italy, it’s also true they’re not so well known by people not already into this music, due also to a lack of useful resources spreading updated news about new releases and music projects, able to catch the eye of the “casual” listener.
Both the duo Gopota and Luce Sia, the Swiss label which has just released their new album entitled Music for primitive, on tape in 60 copies, courageously walk towards very murky waters. Even murkier if we consider how Antonio Airoldi (already known as Empty Chalice) and Vitaly Maklakov have here demonstrated they do not repeat the same album twice, with an uncommon courage showing they are different from other noise projects.
Only few months after the release of their previous album Knots of fear, a desperate, straight to the point and highly distorted noise album enriched by stabbing screams evoking a certain kind of dystopic cinematography (Tarkovskij’s Stalker as well as the evergreen Blade Runner), Gopota choose to follow with a quite different and more introspective work while giving life to five songs, the first one being a short introduction, clearly influenced by death industrial and death ambient.
In Music for primitive, sound changes, but not the landscapes evoked. Cacophony is diluted and dissolved along four very long compositions, preceded by a cold, melancholic, murky and post-industrial introduction. Meaningless represents the quintessence of death industrial as conceived by Airoldi and Vitaly, the alienation of the Postmodern man who’s lost his humanity and, consequently, any sense. Men have become a projection of their digital I and therefore their voice, manipulated and unrecognizable, is a metaphor of our times. The noise-flow on the background is a metaphor of the digital one in which human beings live, a space with no beginning and no end. That’s why we can talk of Gopota’s music as of “primitive” music. It takes the primitive character of the original sound, freed from rhythmic structures, inserted in the flow of time and life.
In Summa liturgica the religious element connotes the Italian socio-cultural context in which Airoldi lives. Here, life and death meet each other. On the one hand there’s the harsh death industrial, the noise-flow, on the other hand there’s the sacred-religious dimension, a ceremony often having a “positive” meaning. Also, here the primitive character of their music can be found. Both choral elements and noise represent the past in the history of music and sound itself, like two primitive metaphors.
With Attitude the listeners leave the fog to reach an open space in which the melancholic feeling is strongly perceivable, a vaguely melodic and introspective death ambient track. Here, primitivism is represented by nature itself. The ending song Empty eye is a sort of long interference under which the Duo paint a scene with hidden boundaries, a sort of digital, virtual, unreal space. It’s a “primitive” song as it vaguely recalls the sound research made by electronic music forerunners.
Music for primitive doesn’t necessarily have to be considered as the most mature album in their short career, but simply as a different emanation of a project, Gopota, detached from genres boundaries and from a discouraging omologation, and that’s their most relevant trademark. It’s a soundtrack for an unreleased movie like several other which were previously made, but what matters the most here is the philosophy of a Duo that have strenghtened the originality of their intentions.
Label: Luce Sia
Voto: 7, 5