Review: Andrea Borghi – texts_und (Sounds Against Humanity, Oct 15)

Tactility is something Andrea Borghi has been exploring in his music over the course of his entire career; apart from his multimedia “discomateria” pieces (circular discs made of various materials, often marble or other types of stone, prepared with both natural and artificial ephemera and played on Borghi’s turntable), the Italian sound artist has coaxed tensile metallic textures from his bass while playing with adventurous quartet VipCancro; constructed miniature worlds of whirs, glitches, and hums using open back VHS recorders; and captured the warbly, lumbering sound of a stylus across fabric. The calming, sterile rustles of texts_und fit in well with these other traversals into physicality, but what’s unique about it is the importance of words. No, there are no actual voices present on the recordings; instead Borghi uses “text-imprinted metal discs” on a prepared turntable—plus some unknown auxiliary devices—and the result is a collection of clean, chirring, circular drones that echo the soothing yet fascinating sounds of other metal-inclined artists (Rie Nakajima, Max Eastley). The five tracks that comprise the tape range from the minuscule cacophony of “#4” to the campfire-like crackles of “#1” to the delightful experiments with space on “#3.”