Producer Riccardo Mazza, filmmaker
Laura Pol, and keyboardist Carlo Bagini form the three piece collective Project
TO. This Italian based collective must immediately rank as one of the most
challenging techno/electronic units working today and certainly one of the most
ambitious of our time. Anyone who consigns the genre to the dance floor alone
and believes it incapable of making a sustained, substantive artistic statement
is well advised to hear their first album The White Side, The Black Side. The
dozen songs comprising their debut are electronica at its most challenging, yet
satisfying, and tied in with an impressively ambitious multimedia concept that
few outfits of any ilk or genre would dare attempt. Project TO not only
attempts it, but they succeed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
The album’s dozen cuts are portioned
into two sets of six – the white side and black side. Traditional electronica
rules the day on the white side. There are enormous beats set to rattle your
speakers and wide-open rhythms that streak along from the first second and
rarely pull back for long. There are even inklings of melody peeking out from
the techno textures on the white side, though Project-TO rarely emphasizes
them. The white side makes frequent use of the human voice – the opener “I
Hope” features voice over samples and other tracks, like “Look Further”, make
even more expansive use of the human voice’s possibilities within this musical
context. The black side’s reinterpretations, or “photographic negatives” as
Project-TO refers to them, are stripped back recastings of the white side
originals, often darker and much more narrow in scope. Few combinations embody
this more than “Rebirth” and its twin “Black Rebirth”. The former takes a
number of surprising turns throughout and has a dramatic arch that’s impossible
to ignore, while its counterpart is a full on auditory bludgeoning of sorts
with much more density and a straighter approach.
The final song for each side, “Roger”
and “Black Roger”, are ideal parting examples of Project-TO’s methodology at
work. The white version is a frantic, rousing finale that amps up all of the
elements defining the earlier white songs with an extra dollop of intensity
added for good measure. Its black side opposite is the thrilling climax to the
album as a whole and turns its white side partner inside out – this is a true
photographic negative of the earlier, dead-eyed and impossibly strong, and
closing the set out under the cover of darkness. The White Side, The Black Side
goes places where few release, especially debuts, dare travel. This is a
collective intent on taking a popular art form never really renowned for
longstanding artistic value and to fashion something from it capable of
withstanding the slings and arrows of posterity. The twelve songs resulting
from these ambitions are ample evidence that they have succeeded. Few albums
this year will make the mental and physical impact on their intended audience
that you hear here from Project-TO.
9 out of 10 stars
David Shouse
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