Club Furies

Increased Control is the project of Giovanni Torricelli, born in 1995 in Florence, Italy. Passionate from an early age for video games and movies with dystopian plots and post-apocalyptic scenarios, he is quickly captured by the «leftist» musical components that characterize them. As he grows up, he unconsciously tries to find a way to get in direct contact with organic, aggressive, and dramatic sounds and interact with them.

A lover of ambient drone, noise, and industrial music, he grew up listening to artists like Atrax Morgue and other exponents of the scene. At that moment his way of conceiving the resonant metallic and organic textures that characterize part of his productions was born. Settled in Berlin, in search of abandoned places and ruins that bring him back to the times of his adolescence. This strengthens his path towards a more and more determined and detailed sound design that represents him; a sound design that mixes analog and digital synthesis. His aim is to transmit to the listener a feeling of total abandonment to the value of time, and the pleasure of getting in touch with his primordial fears, which he believes will always be part of all of us.

«Cinematic textures are the envelope from which the idea of this EP was born». This is how the debut of the Italian artist is presented on the mythical Subsist Records, a label based in Valencia, Spain, whose curation always impresses us. This time, the work is called Esoteric Modules, an album that is the result of processing many field recordings through a modular configuration, which was later digitally manipulated, to which many chains of effects were added. The artist’s thinking behind this process is the high consideration of background sounds, more important than the main sounds. According to this concept, the space created within the track itself offers movement, space, and interesting details to discover while listening. These details, mixed with pressing rhythms, give a dynamic aggressiveness.

One of the songs that make up this work is Neuroblock, which can be translated as a neuronal block, and whose sound brings with it the concept from which the Italian artist starts: getting in touch with our primordial fears. If the neuron is responsible for processing and transmitting information through the entire nervous system, a blockage of the same results in a siege of all the information of the nervous system, which, we can imagine, becomes a brutal fear. The sound is, for its part, overwhelming in a sense that is gratifying, that is, the intensity with which the layers of sound have been built up is pleasurable and exciting.

The vibrations and beats that increase in intensity as the sound leaves its subterranean lares, rising above them, coming to establish contact on the ground, are impressive. However, we will have to say something else about this design: in multiple sound layers, it manages to capture overflowing and expectant emotions and feelings. These sound layers manage to bring out a whole that causes neural blocks as the collision of our nervous system faces the climax to which the sound led us. Neither time nor space, but our most elemental fears: neuronal fission.

From this neuronal disintegration, the sound manages to slip away almost to silence, disintegrating also the multiple sound layers in which it was assembled. Increasingly the neuronal blockade passes, and our body and mind return to prostrate themselves in assible spatiotemporal dimensions. Sound becomes silence, and our existence leaves fears behind. It is an impressive experience, made possible by the enormous quality of the Italian artist’s sound-making. Once again -it must be said-, Subsist Records presents an impressive work. And it must also be said that Esoteric Modules by Increased Control is one of the best releases of this end of the year. So go listen to it.

Artist: Increased Control
Title: Esoteric Modules
Label: Subsist Records
Catalog: SUBSIST​.​229D
Mastered: Magic Studios
Artwork: Malasombra
Release date: December 18th, 2023

1. The Loner
2. Skeptical
3. Qvarts Modvs
4. Cables Can Talk
5. Coil Breaker
6. Neuroblock
7. 24 März

«Sound Expression Against World Pressure”.

Increased Control

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Subsist Records

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Club Furies

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