★Ecstatic
Trax Test
Trax Test’ is the first ever survey of Italy’s pioneering, visionary and influential label and mail art collective Trax, which ran from 1981 - 1987 as a network for the creation of collaborative projects. The collective included a pre-NWW Colin Potter and some of the earliest work from Masami Akita aka Merzbow, but also had deep connections with the art world; a few trax members went on to become famous designers and artists - Ettore Sottsass of hugely influential Memphis Group even guests on vo…
Domestic Exile Collected Works 82-86
2017 repress, originally released in 2015. Ecstatic resuscitate Daniele Ciullini's "sonic polaroids" of odder '80s pop, drone, and drum machine workouts in the detached dimensions of Domestic Exile: Collected Works 82-86. Compiling the Florentine artist's standout '83 cassette plus a whole other side of compilation obscurities on vinyl for the first time, it presents a series of brilliant, isolated self-portraits by a mail art and tape scene insider (also photographer, zine publisher) who op…
Nervous Hydra / All This Has Passed Forever
Stunning split release between Maurizio Bianchi, godfather of the Italian industrial noise scene, and Abul Mogard, the much loved and hyperstitious synthesist, conjuring a spellbinding testament to the transcendent and transportive energies of electronic music. Although appearing to starkly contrast on the surface, both artist’s work patently shares a lust for the suggestive abstraction of raw current and its pareidolia-like capacity to generate rich and uncanny emotional responses from the end…
Selected Works 1982-1992
A fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings Giancarlo and Roberto Drago aka The Tapes, sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever. This set surveys a blind spot in most people's knowledge of early-'80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di piombo or Years of Lead -- a period of domestic political turmoil between the late '60s and early '80s -- and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war. L…