Atrax Morgue – Close To A Corpse 2xLP + 2xCD
Urashima** Comes in a double vinyl for studio tracks and double CD for live tracks, fully remastered by Andrea Marutti, is limited to 199 copies, reproducing the album’s original cover art and inserts. ** On February 24, 2001 Marco Corbelli take part in the performance “Autopsia dell’opera d’arte vivente come vivisezione del corpo di dio” in the Viareggio art gallery, Studio D’Arte Memoria Indelebile. Together with three other artists, he stages an autopsy on a shapeless body, which represents the living work of art. Corbelli actively participates in the pseudo autopsy, as well as sounding the live event.
The recording of the sound performance will be released two years later on Slaughter Productions in an extremely limited box set titled Close To A Corpse consisting of three CDr. The first two CDr contain the complete live recording in the Tuscan art gallery. They are improvised synthesizer recordings, an infected and purulent soundtrack, which actually transports you to the mortuary of a corpse and you can smell its stench pervading your senses. The pauses between one burst of sounds and the other are just the introduction to the next nightmare! The third CDr contains ten wonderful unreleased tracks recorded in the studio in September 2002, apart from Basic Procedure Autopsy (recorded and released in 1995), without the use of vocals or other effects: just the faithful Sequential Circuits Six-Trak.
Both the live tracks and those recorded in the studio represent the artist’s sonic maturity and stand out from the rest of his discography for their eccentricity and the ability to make exceptional use of analog synthesizers, pulsating tones and enveloping frequencies by mixing a shocking atmosphere of hellish manifestation, where cruelty and compulsive disorders are more evident and interesting, showing Corbelli deeper work, pushing himself further into the experience of his concrete ‘’noise’’ vision.
Marco Corbelli’s artistic journey began in the early 90’s. Under the pseudonym of Marco Rotula, he started to release a series of fanzines in A5 format. The first was The Pleasure Agony, followed by Sick and Murders. The aesthetics of these first fanzines were very sophisticated and the content deals with topics that will follow Marco throughout his artistic career: sadism, schizophrenia, insanity, murder, psychosis, necrophilia, diseases, and most importantly death. In 1993, heavily influenced by his obsessions, Marco Corbelli began his musical activities creating the Slaughter Productions label and the Atrax Morgue project. Greatly inspired by Italian Power Electronics act The Sodality, with their 1987 LP Beyond Unknown Pleasures and from projects as Whitehouse and Brighter Death Now, pioneers of a minimal, evil and visceral electronic, Atrax Morgue released his first tape In Search Of Death which will be followed by a series of amazing cassettes in the succeeding years.
Tape after tape, with the help of an analog synthesizer Sequential Circuits Six-Trak, a microphone connected with a Yamaha multi-effect, tape decks and a mixer, Marco Corbelli blows up emotions and delusions, cutting out the hard way inspired portraits of phobias and deviation. With this minimal equipment Marco has created all his shocking releases, excluding Cut My Throat, where he used the Crumar Spirit and in the latest works before he died, as for the collaboration with M.B., he also used RE-201 Space Echo (the only other machines he had used were Crumar Bit One and the Roland 909, both of which were used only for the Mörder Machine side-project).
The main manifesto of Atrax Morgue is the analysis of the death, his perfection and complete habituation: injections of death to continue to live. The putrescence is palpable, and one could almost smell and taste the miasma of decay that pervades the entire discography. Anxiety, alienation and hypochondria turn into a deep paranoia in pain. Without hesitation, the bodies are emptied, leaving the field to an electronics purulence of rare power disconcerting. The psychopathological sound is painful and horrific; creates a mental alteration that initiates brutal operation of psychic surgery, neuroses and split personality. Crosses terrifying rooms lit by neon lights, corridors filled with gruesome tools, machines of blood and bits of human tissue floating in jars of formalin. The hum of the synth, the roar of noise and fights razor are often repeated loops, where each track has a compact structure, following the main theme (of death).
Marco Corbelli’s Atrax Morgue is anxious and psychotic side of the electronic noise; he is a sinister, synthesizer-based jarring project, rich with pulsating tones and throbbing static beats. His severely distorted electronic voice reverberates through the fore ground like the spoken word performance of a homicidal maniac while the music beneath affords a suitable and macabre adieu for your deceased soul. This is the sonic equivalent of regulating the blood flow through a severed jugular, the life slowly draining, the hands kept warm and strictly in the process …
With these vinyl reissues, Urashima has really outdone themselves again! Yet another two in the long line of the important historical / archival work on Atrax Morgue’s catalogue being done by the label which continues the precious restoration and mastering work from the original master tapes with the full authorization and collaboration of the Corbelli family.
“So, obsessions have found a way to come out. Through violent and cold analogue electronic sounds, and my own voice.” – Marco Corbelli