The highlight of the Saturday night entertainment package at this year’s Netmage in Bologna was a piece called Paper Mache .
The visuals came from the National archive of amateur film footage – Home Movies – and live music was from an Italian post-rock quartet called In Zaire
The images were edited from colour film shot with an 8mm camera at the Viareggio street Carnival between 1956 and 1967 by Bolognese cinematographer Alessandro Mantovani.
The footage of huge figures, including titans, demons and fairy tale characters, was surreal ; I imagine there were some terrorized kids in this part of Italy during the actual carnival.
You can see a four-minute version showing some of the striking images (without audio) courtesy of Vimeo. The version at Netmage lasted around 40 minutes.
At this point in the proceedings, after sitting through some chilly and fairly soulless, electronica, the presence of live musicians playing ‘real’ instruments came as a welcome relief. Although the band are called In Zaire, there are no obvious Afrobeat elements to their sound unless you make a wide definition of African tribal rhythms.
The Netmage programme, with characteristic verbosity, gushes about how they explore the paths of “introspective, minimal ascendance”, whatever that may mean.
Their set looked to be improvised and the music had no obvious link to the images projected behind them – they could have been playing to a vampire movie or Jacques Cousteau oceanographic documentary for all it mattered .
Still, their storming set was a psych-noise blast of epic space-rock proportions with meaty drums, freaky primal wailing, slabs of guitar abuse (partly played with cello bow) and live electronics. Great stuff, and it is to be hoped that the band stay together long enough to capture some of this raw energy on disc.
There certainly was nothing as remotely passionate or stirring to be found in the rest of the night’s programme as my other posts will relate.
