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Sinistri: Free Pulse Sinistri, an experimental Italy-based outfit formerly called Starfuckers, accurately describes its sound as 'nonmetric music.' By the group's own admission, its members take elements and techniques from traditional rock music as source material to produce a kind of intuitive 'non-music' where the normally expressive tropes of rock and blues are stripped from the music to render it more neutral. The core of the group's minimal sound is the jerky, asynchronic pulsation of Roberto Bertacchini's drumming and Manuele Giannini's guitar, with electronic treatments and manipulations (from Alessandro Bocci on computer and sampler, plus Dino Bramanti's real-time processing/live mixing and sampling) surrounding the two in a perpetual swirl. Initially, the undeviating lurch of the rhythms is jarring, but one quickly becomes attuned to that. The focus then shifts to the mutating electronics and guitar interplay which resourcefully draws upon free jazz, punk, rock, and blues traditions. While Sinistri might trumpet the neutrality of its ego-less sound, it's impossible not to hear echoes of James 'Blood' Ulmer, Sonny Sharrock, and Derek Bailey in Giannini's guitar playing when he coaxes such a wide range of riffs and squawks from the instrument. At the same time, there's not a great deal that distinguishes one song from the next as, once established, the group then strays little from its distinctive template over the course of the album's ten tracks and fifty-five minutes. March 2005 |
