CD – Raster

The moniker ASA hides the identities of Uwe Schmidt, Arturo Lanz and Saverio Evangelista. Schmidt is a veteran of electronics in its various declinations, with an impressive number of productions, an artist who anticipated the genesis of several subgenres and trends. Lanz and Evangelista are instead famous for their work in the post-industrial combo Esplendor Geométrico, active still now, despite Lanz living in Beijing and Evangelista in Rome. The combination could only be hyper-vivid, a harbinger of the stinging editing and cuts scientifically operated by the German master, but also soaked with the machinic overlaps and rhythms that are often metallic or swollen due to the hard and insisting distortions the Italian-Spanish duo inserted. Among the grooves also some translated exoticisms pop up, according to models typical of the Esplendor Geométrico, who, to begin with Saverio Evangelista joining the project in the nineties, enlarged their horizon of fascinations, and now are at their ease in a radical and hyperbolic creative fusion, here designed in ten tracks, who might be appropriate also in a dancefloor key. Among the ruling retromanies, the ebm and the idm are the least predictable. People of Raster, the label of the release, rightly underlines the “extraordinary atemporal” of this production – even “meta-contemporary” – without blinking at the lost time or emphasizing the style recoveries on play. The immoderate obsession with the past has perhaps reached its natural saturation limit and not casually in the cover’s notes – also ironically – AtomTM, Lanz and Evangelista call themselves “the last three futurists on earth”. The modernity does not exist anymore, “everything is current and everything is retro”, we would say quoting Jean Baudrillard, with the awareness that such huge artists very well know they come from another age and had signed the history of music in such a way impossible to propose again, according to the same usual formulas. Not wanting to free ourselves from the rock of an eternal new, which came to exist for the first time only after the first half of the seventies, we now resort to unprecedented combinations of elements, to a dialectical rearrangement of the forms, that in this case is brave and coherent, an occasion for the old guard to return – and well – to express their own voice.

 

ASA – Radial