- Many of Marco Shuttle's past 12-inches—2011's The Vox Attitude, this year's Sing Like A Bird—have been dubbed out techno for the dance floor, but his debut album bumps in an altogether different fashion. Trembling with creepy echoes and unnerving crepitations, Visione embodies the name of Shuttle's label (Eerie) and is "uncanny" in the Freudian sense of the term: familiar and alien at the same time. It's music taken far away from the club and plunged into a nightmarish version of the immersive sound worlds also inhabited by fellow Italians Dino Sabatini and Donato Dozzy, where texture and abstraction take precedence over conventional melody and rhythm.
Shuttle recently collaborated with Dozzy for an EP as Anxur, and his sparring partner appears here on opening track "The Chaos." As with Voices From The Lake (Dozzy's LP with Neel), sounds are twisted and transmogrified into shapes unidentifiable from their original source. Yet while that album instilled a sense of meditative calm, here the music becomes increasingly sinister and ferocious.
Shuttle may have a background in fashion, but his closest equivalents in the art world would probably be Janet Cardiff and Geoege Bures Miller, a Canadian duo whose work is haunted by hollow spaces and disquieting details. The hammer-and-anvil beats of "Beyond The Mass" bring to mind Cardiff and Miller's "The Killing Machine," a torture contraption inspired by Franz Kafka's story In The Penal Colony. Other tracks, like "Buona Visione," recall the score to David Lynch's Eraserhead. Like the baby in that film, Visione is something more likely to terrify you than be taken to your heart. For what really drives these tracks forward isn't their rhythms—which often feel like someone grinding their teeth—but a slow and relentless rise in intensity, such as in "Elephante," which sounds like a mutilated brass ensemble being dragged into the abyss.
Not for nothing then is the final track called "The Way Out." Given the claustrophobic catacombs you've waded through to get there, this piece of Oneohtrix Point Never-style ambience feels like both a breath of fresh air and a blessed relief.
TracklistA1 The Chaos... (with Donato Dozzy)
A2 And Then...
B1 Beyond The Mass
B2 Buona Visione
C1 Masay Lama
C2 Elephante
D1 Volts
D2 The Way Out