Antonio Marini could best be described as an Italian neo-futurist. His Healing Force Project, inaugurated in 2010, has continued to stick to the same hard and fast rule to create mind-blowing, sonically challenging future music – a manifesto he has pursued doggedly ever since. Drifted Entities (Vol. 2), the latest entry in his unrelenting discography, provides plenty of future shock, especially if you’ve not got to enjoy his melee of electronic jazz, broken beats and drum n bass before now.
Last year he released the equally frantic Drifted Entities (Vol. 1), a broadly more dubby experience, though in truth, the maximalist content of these extended EPs is not too dissimilar in scope or execution. On the second volume, the free jazz seems to be freer, the skittering drums more skittery, and the structures more structureless, though put either on and your ears will no doubt be pinned down and assaulted. If Marini is an abstract sound painter then these wild, non-linear sonic tableaux require a leap of faith and a level of immersion to really appreciate them fully, though you may just as easily want to run away in horror.
Opener ‘Future Space Exploration’ limbers up under the aegis of some cosmic noodling and what sounds like the tuning of drums, emerging with some sporadic tablas and synth squelches to give it some pep. Eventually, a skittery, sonic spider lopes into view, dancing on the drum skins to create an insidious kind of mayhem. ‘Adrift In The Stratosphere’ rather does what it says on the tin, transporting the listener to a weightless orbit with more sci-fi skittering and this time some muted trumpet slathered in lots of cosmic delay. The trumpet returns on side two on the briefly pensive then hyperactive ‘It’s Your Brain Food’, which is oddly reminiscent of Sly and Robbie’s collaboration with Vladislav Delay and Norwegian trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær, though where Nordub was spacious and unhurried, this is the polar opposite.
There are moments where it can all become too much, like on ‘Vehicular Activity’, where the agitated organs crash menacingly against the rhythmic chassis, or ‘Thinking Outside The Box’, which jitters like sickness under the skin at times, though it’s music that alters depending on one’s mood, and it has the capacity to sound different each time you listen to it. It’s almost Cubist then in its dimensions, which perhaps makes Marini a neo-cubo-futurist rather than a plain old neo-futurist. Like the music itself, Healing Force Project is not something that can easily be put into a box.
