Review by David Keenan - Volcanic Tongue
Great archival exhumation of a previously unreleased album from Italian Industrial/electronics legend Maurizio Bianchi recorded in 1981. Technology X has a parallel relationship to the 1981 double cassette Technology with a similar palette but with a completely different track listing. It catches MB on the cusp of a bunch of different approaches, with conveyor belt rhythms and miasmic/organic electronics giving way to triumphal single note keyboard solos that are as epic as Fushitsusha circa Pathetique. Some of the keyboard work has the wonky appeal of the early Asmus Tietchens/Conrad Schnitzler sides but the fidelity is so rusty and destroyed, with serrated beams of electro-violence threaded between sad gothic keyboard-isms, that it feels more related to terrestrial apocalypse than cosmo-fantasy. Edition of 218 copies with MB badge, fully remastered and highly recommended.
Review by Jim Haynes - Aquarius Records
The entire MB back catalogue is a daunting encyclopedia of industrial noise, bleak abstraction, and internalized struggles with abjection and salvation. Bianchi has been known to recycle titles for considerably different compositions, with Symphony For A Genocide being truncated for a different work called SFAG. The same goes for Technology, as this was the name of a double cassette originally released in 1981 with several bootlegs to follow until an official 2cd set was made available through At War With False Noise in 2009. Technology X is an entirely different composition, although much of the same electronic gear was obviously used in both sets of recordings (and throughout all of the MB recordings in the early '80s for that matter). Similarly, the track titles are slightly different ("Techno-X" vs. "Techno" and "Logy-X" vs. "Logy"); at the same time, the tracks on Technology X are considerably more caustic than those tracks on the original Technology.
Bianchi has long been an obsessive composer and documentarian of his work, which emerged in birth pangs of Industrial Culture in 1980 through the first of many self-released cassettes. His neurotic drones, turgid noises, and bleak electronics recognized influences from the Kraut-electron-magicians of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream; but Bianchi was far more interested in revealing his own theories on the disintegration of the human mind, body, and soul through the encroachment of technological and informational warfare. Technology X, like the aforementioned SFAG album, is a very bleak undertaking of abstracted blorping electronics distorted and mangled through a number of effects giving the impression of a scorched battlefield rumbling with numerous panzer divisions, raked machine-gun fire, and various experimental weapons decimating whoever might be unfortunate enough not to have died in the first wave of dive-bombs and ballistic missiles. His compositions are known for their many turns and twists, moving from mind-wiping lazer shots to engine-revving accelerations of noise and into weirdly militant musical moments of atonal stabs on his synthesizer. It's altogether an exhilarating and claustrophobic recording; and one that's limited to a little over 200 copies. The cassette also comes with an MB / Technology X button!
