VIVENZA, Realite De L'Automation Directe, Realites Servomecaniques, Modes Reel Collectifscds, 2009/10/11RotoreliefThe concept of Industrial as representing the sounds of heavy industry themselves got a bit lost early in the piece. Despite the use of metal by the you-know-who's of the genre, the idea of replicating and presenting the sound of pure, soul-less machinery in action seemed a bit beyond the imagination and/or ability of most of the precursors, at least as far as I can tell. Yet it was the Futurists who noticed the potential and that was decades ago.
So Vivenza consciously takes up the torch and presents replication, by tape and other means, of factory and warehouse in sound. The result is wonderfully non-human, despite the fact that everything has had to be made and moved by human hands, this music included. There is still the very definite aesthetic sense that these sounds are not made as music for musical consumption, but are the results simply of extraneous sound from machinery. Or at least, that's how I like to hear it.
My personal favourite is "Realite De L'automation Directe", two lengthy pieces of pure mechanical monotony. The first based on a loop sample (listen closely and you can just here the slight click where the loop joins) that I presume has been treated with effects, but possibly not. It is a rhythm in itself, slightly melodic but solely mechanical. The second is based on a simple, strident clanging tone that definitely has some echo placed on it, more abrasive and intrusive like a continuous hole-punch. For twenty minutes both rhythm pieces are allowed to clang while other sounds, mostly mechanical, sometimes of the human voice, are laced over them. That is all – a simple idea made effective as much by the blatant lack of consideration of the listeners' approach as by the composers care in construction. That there is a hypnotic effect in both pieces is almost a given, but I wonder if Vivenza would be gracious to the idea of his music being taken as psychedelic. In any case, this album alone puts to bed the worthless idea that rhythmic, repetitive music is a mere techno wank fit only for drugged out hippies.
I had "Realities Servomechaniques" as mp3s for a while so I was looking forward to getting the album itself as the first track, "Proliteriat & Industrie", had been something of a personal favourite for a while. It's particularly strong in that it has a few audible ranges whereas the rest of the spirals on this album seem to have the same, somewhat flat, higher sound. Which is not to say there is anything necessarily wrong with any of them, only to point out that the first track has something of more diversity. But all the pieces, and the album entire, is worthy, more perhaps from an intellectual rather than emotive point of view.
"Modes Reels Collectifs", like "Realite De L'automation Directe", is ostensibly two lengthy pieces but each piece is more a composite of different samples, cut up and placed together in a concrete collage style, various sample loops manipulated in different ways, dropped out, placed back in, in an almost improvisational style. Considering this was made in 1981 I doubt there's any digital faffing about, more use of tape. "Partie 1" is based more on very rhythmic loops, whereas "Partie 2" starts off with a more soundscape feel, free-er and looser, like actually being in an industrial area, moving around, picking up sounds as they come and go, before bringing in the slow, constant clang of mechanism for the duration of the piece.
This music is like a collage pictorial of a particular age and ideology (although Vivenza would no doubt disagree about "a particular age"), the twentieth century's mechanisation in everyday life. While World War One hastened that mechanisation in the service of various nations' desire to dominate others, the era of mass production was also accelerated by "peace" time greed, the desire to have the latest thing off the conveyor belt, which transformed entire landscapes to cities of industrial production, drowning nature and numbing humans. I'm sure that Vivenza, bruitist that he is, has no such sentimentality in looking at industrialisation, preferring instead a cool, aesthetic appreciation of the machines and their very processes themselves. Which is what makes this music so great. It is cold, clinical, but a definite aesthetic presentation and shaping of machine sound for it's own glory.
