[reviews] afe120mcd
andrea marutti / tommaso cosco: turra

Andrea Marutti is a veteran of the electronic avant-garde who also curates a beautifully-designed, cutting-edge CD-R label, Afe Records. Tommaso Cosco is his best friend and is not a musician, but rather a kind of modern-day Medici with dirt under his fingernails - he's both a fireman and an enthusiast of the experimental arts, hosting concerts and happenings on his property Archiaro, near Catanzaro in the arch of the foot of the boot of Italy. Andrea suggests you have a look around the property, and by visiting http://www.archiaro.it, you can.

The "Turra" of the title refers to a small, abandoned storehouse, where Cosco's vocals were spontaneously recorded one August day. The two friends then went into the studio and proceeded to subject that recording to such treatment as to render it almost unrecognizable as human, except perhaps at once instance as we approach the end of this short, but harrowing journey, when a howl is unleashed that could raise the dead.

Marutti and Cosco take us to the deepest, darkest place they can imagine, spelunking the inky blackness of a twisting, turning cave that seems to lead to the very core of the earth itself. "Turra" rumbles hollowly, organic but with the occasional machine edge on it, bathed in reverb that seems to just keep doubling over and over on itself until the deepest, darkest and most hopeless of states of mind is forced upon the listener. If you played this before you went to bed, it would give you nightmares.

[Stephen Fruitman]