Scatenato Ma Non Troppo #3
Regular Columns / Scatenato Ma Non Troppo • June 22, 2021
At the midpoint of 2021, a year which has thus far brought both hopeful and more troubling signs for humanity, I’ve put together another batch of offbeat submissions sent in to Scene Point Blank. On to the weird, the wacky, the wonderful! Vitamin – Recordings 1981 I think the first time I really got exposed to so-called “no wave” music was back in the early 2000s when I picked up a couple of DVD releases of NYC transgressive cinema. These films, by the likes of R. Kern and Nick Zedd, featured an assault of disturbing imagery and manic visuals, usually alongside noisy, discordant, frequently just broken sounding music of a sort I had never experienced before. As time went on, I discovered more of what the genre had to offer, and have always looked forward to seeing what kind of stuff gets rediscovered with time. Needless to say, when I heard about a compilation of tracks from Boston four-piece Vitamin, a band which existed from about 1979 to ‘83, I was immediately intrigued. Tinny guitar and shrieky violin (which speak to the level of “anything goes” that used to be the norm in “art punk”) placed over thunderous, pulsing bass that sounds sometimes like a plane engine readying for takeoff. And then there’s the snotty and atonal vocals. I don’t know what I’d expect teenagers to be producing in the late early ‘80s, but this probably ain’t it. Or maybe it is. It sounds like this band is positively having … Read more
Scatenato Ma Non Troppo #2
Regular Columns / Scatenato Ma Non Troppo • February 21, 2021
Well, the train wreck of 2020 is in the rearview, but I’ve collected another selection of submissions that Scene Point Blank received in the past year or so that were … Read more
Scatenato Ma Non Troppo #1
Regular Columns / Scatenato Ma Non Troppo • September 7, 2020
Each and every week, Scene Point Blank receives hundreds (and hundreds) of submissions for possible coverage. Some of these are really cool (Beck’s collaboration with the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab), … Read more
