Description
Extended Breakdown documents the unholy alliance between Marco Fusinato and underground black metal legend Striborg. Referred to as a piece for ‘guitar & multiple forces’ and held over three nights in 2017 at Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival, the performance brought Fusinato’s wall of noise guitar together with an earth-rattling percussive foundation realised by Striborg with an array of industrial detritus, metal poles, and four cars. Held in an enormous warehouse space and amplified through a PA fit for a stadium, the performance assailed the audience with a wall of sound of crushing physical proportions. Pushed back behind a barrier at the front of the space for safety considerations, many audience members were unable to stomach it for more than a few minutes. Harsh spotlighting revealed a ravaged post-apocalyptic landscape of overturned cars, increasingly destroyed over the three nights as Striborg, in his signature corpse paint, pummelled their massively amplified bodies with metal poles while Fusinato unleashed torrents of bottom-heavy noise guitar.
However, far from a monolithic wall of noise, the four sides of this ultra hi-fi document of the performance are highly dynamic. The performance begins with Striborg scraping a metal pole on the concrete floor before turning to the mic for a long passage of unaccompanied vocals that moves from sacred intonations to guttural growls, provided with added atmospherics from the massively reverberant warehouse space. Making optimum use of simple electronics, Striborg’s vocals eventually degenerate into pure abstract sizzle. When Fusinato finally enters, his guitar has an oxygen-evaporating force reminiscent of Japanese sludge legends Corrupted, moving from almost black metal style chordal moves to endlessly droning single tones to eruptions of Sharrock-esque free noise. As Striborg begins to percussively smash the cars with metal poles, the piece takes on a deranged ritualistic atmosphere that calls to mind the haunted reverberant spaces of early Abruptum. The cars are eventually flipped onto their roofs and ground into the concrete floor, generating a sonic cloud of crunching textural detail that bounces violently between the walls of the cavernous space. Captured in stunning high fidelity that allows for the brute physicality of the performance to be translated into the home environment, Extended Breakdown is a exhilarating collision of black metal and noise aesthetics, bringing together two of extreme music’s most rugged individuals.
Housed in gatefold sleeve with extensive monochromatic photographs inside and on individual record sleeves. Limited edition of 300.
