(this text was presented at Modena Sobborghi in November 2022)
The Sonic Belligerence Decree (Decreto Belligeranza Sonica), unlike and in sharp opposition to the totally improvised spirit of the 434 bis, born of people who are not in the business, is forged by centuries and centuries of work in the field. Indeed, the first signs of free parties date back to the 1500s, precisely to the dancing plague of 1518 (rechristened the Renaissance French-Tek), when in Strasbourg in Alsace roughly 400 people, probably because of mass hysteria, began to dance for days, and after about a month some of them died of heart attack, stroke or exhaustion. It is then that Sonic Belligerence (Holy Grail of breakbeat) began to study the alchemy of the transmutation of the self through frenetic and disjointed movements, a heresy that then spread throughout Europe.
Strengthened by this centuries-old deepening of knowledge, we appoint ourselves the commission "Rave Arthur and the Knights of the Four-on-the-Floor Kick," apostles of the Chanson de Ròland (saga 303, 404, 808, 909), and in this capacity we have drafted the first points of a decree-law that is not mere electoral propaganda by clowns in Government who, in an extremely problematic situation such as today's international one, concern themselves with a few thousand kids dancing.
Let us start, then, with the points of art. 23 bis:
\- the bpm must strictly be above the ceiling of 1000, the threshold beyond which the world of EXTRATONE opens up, reducing the number of participants to the hard core of the die-hards. Above 1000 bpm, in fact, the kick is no longer perceptible, one hears only a concrete drone, in which hyper-fast music is paradoxically transmuted into hyper-slow;
\- the beat must be absolutely chopped up, hyperkinetic and dystrophic, interweaving odd polyrhythms that call into question the primacy of the Western conception of music devoted to celebrating sound for the mind over sound for the body. By opening the beat to the influence of the most varied musical traditions of South America, Asia, Africa and the remotest nooks of the planet, the rhythm of the sound will turn out infinitely more stimulating than the zombie/tekno 4/4;
\- the age of the event's participants must be mixed from 0 to 100 years, on the model of psy-trance parties, which present a non-discriminatory range of life stages, avoiding the uniformity of the tekno-kids. From psy-trance, too, the creative importance of the location is to be borrowed, an active element in the success of the initiative as much as the music;
\- it is recommended that the resolution of the sound, at certain peak moments, take on a nostalgic inclination toward obsolete technologies, from 8 to 1 bit;
\- vocal samples taken from hyper-pop tracks must either be slowed down so as to become menacing voices coming from a dark twilight (screwed) or sped up in a way that mocks the commercial sound from which they were sampled, by the skilled scalpel of the producer-surgeon;
\- the most niche sonic heresies are to be supported, from drum'n'noise to speedcore, extratone, ragga-core, industrial reggaeton, dub-core, while the obvious formulas that seem to dominate the current free-party scene, totally lacking in originality and distinctive character, are to be rejected, making club music infinitely more interesting to the ears of the sonic belligerents;
\- the sound defined as post-club or deconstructed club, whichever you prefer, is also to be categorically rejected. To this intellectual mush that neither makes you dance nor sounds innovative, we propose sounds that have in fact deconstructed the club since the 1990s, such as breakcore in its various phases and mutations.
LESS 434 BIS MORE TB303!
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →