My review: Flavio Ferri / Alex Dematteis - Speakdown

 My Review 

Flavio Ferri / Alex Dematteis - Speakdown

A black river flows in the veins of those who believe they still have red blood: a guilty unconsciousness that numbs the senses, reason, that disguises and distorts the truth to end up in the comfort zone, the number one enemy of wisdom, of well-being, of common sense and truth which builds the foundations of a personal and then collective improvement.

There is a culprit: the selfish deceiver. 

It sodomised the flow of time that had limits but various reasonablenesses.

Flavio Ferri and Alex Dematteis have found it and confronted it: an inhuman, cruel, unjust, violent act that should not be done, let's hope they were joking.

Their work is called Speakdown, three distressing and desecrating rides with drawn and very lucid swords inside this villain that hides and shows only the presumed wellness infecting modern civilisation.

They have not photographed reality because images are made to be forgotten, they are of little use if not combined with a reason that stands up to react and act, if it is appropriate to do so.

Everything they have produced is a hard struggle, inch by inch within Capitalism and the Market, siamese brothers of an anaesthetised and vulgarised existence. The two guys have planned a delirium, a contrast full of indigestible fragments capable of grating first the auditory apparatus and then the conscience.

Missiles on craters full of pitch, where there are no glimmers of lucidity that can comfort and be propositive points.

They have taken on the role of destroyers of what was already shattered in itself, creating apocalyptic scenarios, erasing the pleasantness of listening to music, which has become magma, sparks of tar, nebula, sonic devastation, cancelling and crushing the boring and useless song form.

Courageous and combative beyond all acceptable limits, Flavio Ferri has acted intentionally without concern for approval (another catastrophic element of the market) and has instead constructed a deadly device in which all his insatiable combativeness has generated screeching as a consequence of the relation between the concept and the means used.

In doing so, the Milan-born artist has been able to free his expressiveness, his precision, he has aimed and fired his device, he has turned his back on comfort to make us widen our eyes: all that remains is indifference to all this madness, but for him it would be the evident manifestation that the Market and its various associates are taken for granted and in this way he would manifest his victory, aware that in all this happiness would not find a place.

Unfortunately.

For his part, Dematteis, on assignment of Ferri, wrote stories, scraped the reason of selfishness, inveighed, reddened his breath and planned a set of thoughts that could give an account of failure.

He insisted on describing human toxicity and vivisecting the squalor of a massive communication, but lacking a cultured and elevated message, he decided to film with words bitter drops of poison and fuses of unsolved and difficult to codify thoughts.

Relationships, selfishness, the sense of possession of objects, the seriousness of human silences in favour of the chaos of consumption were the creative spark of the two guys to make a heavy, hostile, indigestible record, but not obvious. They were determined and aware and brought art to the place where it seems most absent: that of the desire to turn disasters into a starting point, as an invitation to a collective sense that could change the game.

But they will fail: the world has too many flat follies to accept this one, which is lucid and hyperdynamic.

Song by Song 

Daily Snapshot No.1

The light of the behavioural nuclear aftermath opens up on an electronic carpet and the voice of the Stock Exchange arrives to signal the horror of what will survive: the hunger for speculation, for profit. Ferri walks slowly with the analogue procession representing trembling, precariousness, banality struggling to win. Sounds, like burning and confirmed destruction, appear until a heavy bass line accords with a paranoid and obsessive vibrato. From that moment on it is a non-stop succession of detritus out of rhythm to sentence the emptiness that has won over the human system of alienation. Seventeen minutes of heartbreak and vertigo, with signs of terror and resignation at the same time: the catastrophe has just begun.

Fuck the Style

Dematteis and Ferri immediately begin with the theatrical representation of the emptiness that feels pleased with itself, the torrent of nonsense entering the illusion of a loneliness that thinks it can find in technology the only way to enhance communication, which has become non-existent precisely for this reason. Flavio creates anguish, silent movies with psychedelic and industrial waves, beats and sound layers with a high thermal density: everything is frozen, almost pulverized by catastrophic flows in a perpetual cycle. Alex examines human disaster and ignorance with its absence, following Flavio to advance dramatically in a violent procession: all that is left to show human imbecility is that manner. Almost sixteen minutes of shocking sound torture to become the landing on the skin of death and to celebrate and define the end of everything. Without repetition. 

Understress 

The ballet of the deluded, the nightmares that become an infinite cry find their definitive home in the oppressive and chilling atmosphere of Ferri's ruins with an imprecise beat, creating a hallucinated dance-like, sometimes sensual, with melodic hints that deceive, as reality deceives itself. A sidereal mantra stops gravitating in the celestial vault and glides over a world in a state of stress. The words of Dematteis are needles, as are Ferri's gloomy circuits: united in certifying the Market which, compact, crushes our brains. Warlike and cunning mantras scratch the ears with the opposition to the rhythmic sense, everything is broken, interrupted and resumed like inevitable jerks, until it shatters the resistance of our listening. Words like contagious worms explore and pass judgment and the music is not such, but a hallucinogenic mushroom that disfigures lucidity. It is a cataclysmic flow, a perpetrated violence that on a bastard electronic music, plunders all that remains of human nothingness...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

29th April 2022

https://www.vrec.it/prodotto/ff01/