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1818: first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
2018: many horrific applications of technology (social network for example with their push to have people volunteering their time and creativity for their IT business purpose, they are represented in the book by @maryshelley.fr, not to mention the applications of technology like breakcore and the other musical sub-style, or the society of spectacle created monster Bally Corgan).
Frankenstein, or the 8 Bit Prometheus
micro-literature, hyper-mashup, Sonic Belligeranza records 17th anniversary
by
Riccardo Balli
buy @ Chili Com Carne online store, Tasca Mastai (Lisboa), Linha de Sombra (Lisboa), Tigre de Papel (Lisboa), Livraria do Simão (Escadinhas de S. Cristóvão, Lisboa), Le Bal des Ardents (Lyon), Matéria Prima (Porto), Utopia (Porto), Senhora Presidenta (Porto), Radical Bookstore (Vienna), Anarchistische Buchhandlung (Vienna), Chick Lit (Vienna), Stuwerbuch (Vienna), Housman (London), Toolbox (Paris), Freedom Press (London), Soziealistischer Plattenbau (Hamburg), Quimby's (Chicago), XYZ (Lisboa), Bivar (Lisbon), Tortuga / Disgraça (Lisbon), Just Indie Comics (Italy), Kingpin Books (Lisbon), Socorro (Porto) and Neat Records (Lisbon).
Released on 6th April 2018 @ Rauchhaus, Berlin ... mention at Bandcamp article about Extratone genre ... Portuguese release @ Tasca Mastai, Lisbon 12th July, 20h; and DJ set party @ Lounge, 23h ... Low-resolution séance @ Galeria Municipal do Porto, 13th July under the influence of the exhibition O Ontem morreu hoje, o hoje morre amanhã ... presentations @ Lauter Lärm (Wien) om 2sd August & Echo Buecher (Berlin) on 26th September 2018 ... registered in Neural magazine archive (wow!) ... presentation @ Buchandhung Stuwerviertel (Vienna), 18th January 2019 ... presentation @ Rosa Parks (Chiuppano), 6th April 2019 ... article at Zweikommasieben
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After having whistled quite a number of 8-bit versions of famous pop songs, and delighted his ears with chip-tune covers of black metal and classical music, Riccardo Balli thought it was about time to extend micro-music aesthetics to literature, and remix Mary Shelley's classic accordingly.
Through some sort of low-resolution séance, the author evoked the spirit of corpse reviver Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834), credited for having inspired The Modern Prometheus. Aldini tells a compressed version of the original Frankenstein, exposing its language to retro-gaming jargon and simplifying the plot as if it were an arcade game.
The aforementioned 18th-century electrifier was the nephew of eminent Bolognese scientist Luigi Galvani. Also from MIDIevil Bologna is DJ Balli's electronic music label Sonic Belligeranza, whose 17 years of existence (2000-2017) this volume celebrates with 17 texts that explore the multitude of contradictory sounds constituting the corpse of this Sonic Frankenstein.
Send him an impulse from your Game-Boy! BLEEEEEEEEEEEP!
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ATTENTION The file "A forward to further experiments from MIDIevil Bologna" is corrupted. Remember to read page 16 between 20 and 21 to recover the original text meaning
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DJ Balli (1972) is a DJ/ producer, and founder of the label Sonic Belligeranza. A true fundamentalist of Breakcore since year zero of this non-genre of music, as the style was getting more and more codified, he progressively tried to personify its attitude and even bring it outside of audio realms. Hence following the motto of M(C)ary Shell8Bit "Every cacophony is possible, infect the Underground!", the creation in his lab a la Bolognese of Sound Monsters such as skateboard-noise, gangsta-opera and his infamous poetry readings pretending to be Billy Corgan from The Smashing Pumpkins. Riccardo Balli is also active as a writer: Anche Tu Astronauta (1998), Apocalypso Disco (2013), Frankenstein Goes to Holocaust (2016), all in Italian, this is his first full-length book in English.
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FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDBACK
Introduzido por um ressuscitado Giovanni Aldini - através da galvinização
provocada pela corrente eléctrica de nove cartuchos de Game Boy
dispostos em hexagrama -, este «remix literário de baixa qualidade» é
mais uma alquimia de Ricardo Balli (...) Este livro é uma bizarra justaposição do Frankenstein
de Mary Shelley com a cultura gamer (as planícies geladas do Pólo
Norte são substituídas pelas da Cool, Cool Mountain do Super Mario
64, homens são bots, amigos e irmãos passam a Game Boys) e outros
elementos da cultura pop (...) Aqui,
o monstro de Frankenstein é uma incompleta remistura musical, que jura
vingança contra o criador, toda a humanidade e as convenções musicais
repressivas e autocráticas que desprezam o seu chiar emancipado e
rejeitam a criação de um remix tão grotesco quanto ele.
Além deste excêntrico exercício, Balli escreve sobre subculturas
e subgéneros musicais que surgiram no final do século passado:
revisitando a conotação neo-nazi do gabber e purificando-o da apatia
do 4/4, atira-se às possibilidades revolucionárias do breakcore e do
hiper-mashup dentro da alienação tardo-capitalista; procede à mistura
definitiva entre skaters, situacionistas e accionistas vienenses; sugere
que o horizonte tecnológico é a reunião do humano com o resto da
fauna, numa simbiose sónica já tentada por Caninus ou Run the Jewels; revela
que o grande cisma deste nosso confuso tempo é a violenta divisão entre
aqueles que consideram ou negam que o splittercore é um subgénero
autónomo do speedcore.
Balli é (...) o derradeiro farsante durante a speedrun final, o Grande
Apropriador, um artesão do ofício profano do colagismo, que troça da
autenticidade do autor, rouba-lhe a voz e utiliza-a para proveito de todos.
Apresenta-nos à nova arte do social: aquela que liberta um Prometeu
ultra-moderno, alimentado por um discurso aparentemente demente,
mas que, no fim de contas, apenas apresenta a obsolescência da sisudez
à colectividade, ao mesmo tempo que cose a manta de retalhos de uma
modernidade esgotada.
Russo in A Batalha
The relevance of this book is not just the content, but also the way it is reflexively reworked with a plagiarist and demystifying attitude. (...) A second layer in the book’s composition is the core literary metaphor that supports the patchwork put together by the author (i.e. the creative elaboration of the novel Frankenstein) (...), the idea of a new living entity made up by parts coming from other dead bodies is a perfect metaphor to give expression to the culture of plagiarism and plunderphonics. To do this, Balli’s writing exercise consists of re-writing Shelley’s original text infusing in it musical references coming from those same music electronic genres performed by Balli as a musician (including styles like 8-bit music, gabber and grindcore), with the further addition of other interventions. In these excerpts we read about Mary Shelley (called Squirting Mary) and Lord Byron(anism) engaged in an MCing contest where all participants “should attempt to create the most horrific sonic monster of music history” (...) After much effort, the monster finally comes to life in the shape of a mash-up generated in Shelley’s “bedroom studio” with a Gameboy, where the modified machine starts producing “most scary sounds: remixes of neo-melodic Neapolitan singers in a porno-grindcore style!” (...).
As the readers can tell from these examples, demystification is a relevant ingredient of the book, as the author does not attempt to sacralise the art of plagiarism, instead insisting on a relentless endeavour to reframe plagiarism in a sarcastic way, explicitly linked with the situationist tradition. This demystification is particularly evident in the third type of content in the book, represented by a set of Dadaist passages where, for example, famous bands’ names are distorted in irreverent ways with mash-up techniques; some also accompanied by humorous visuals, including a photo of (...) "Lionel Nietzsche’s” album “Is it Truth you are looking for?”. Probably the most situationist section of the book is where the author recalls the history of his alter ego, Bally Corgan—inspired by Billy Corgan from the Smashing Pumpkins (who the author physically resembles)—an alter ego actually used by DJ Balli along the years in both his recordings and live acts. Above all, this last example helps to understand the actual continuity between the situationist spirit of the book and Balli’s whole artistic career.
Unfortunately available to an Italian-speaking readership only, the book succeeds in offering an original, meta-discursive and demystifying contribution on plunderphonic culture, not just for the content it offers, but also for its ability to intertwine multiple discursive layers, producing an experiment that is finally able—like Frankenstein’s efforts—to give birth to a weird and bizarre textual monster.
Dance Cult about the Italian (and different) version of this book - academics are always late...
I've enjoyed Balli's Frankenstein book so far - that guy is a total lunatic, which I appreciate.
Heikki Rönkkö (by email)
The 'Frankenstein' book was an incredibly detailed work, well researched and written - the only negative for me was that I didn't know enough about a lot of the subject matter to be able to fully immerse myself in it. I appreciated it hugely, however, because of the obvious enthusiasm with which it was written and the in-depth knowledge of the writer about his subject, his passion. In one sense it was like reading a fanzine of old, with personal writings, reviews, interviews etc. - as a fanzine writer myself it certainly struck a chord with me.
In reviewing Frankenstein, Or The 8-Bit Prometheus, Reynolds warned his readers of the danger that Balli might become the messiah of the enemies of realism. “Here at last was a self-proclaimed advocate of anti-writing: explicitly anti-realist and by implication anti-reality as well. Here was a writer ready to declare that words were meaningless and that all communication between human beings was impossible. Reynolds conceded that Balli presented a valid personal vision, but “the peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to writing or music of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.’ Balli was moving away from realism, with “characters and events [that] have traceable roots in life” – from the writing of Paul Virilio, Stewart Home, Bill Drummond, Mark Manning, Lester Bangs, Brecht and Sartre.
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