The phenomenon of noise dudes turning their hands to techno has become a familiar one, but to date there hasn’t been so much in the way of return traffic, and probably little wonder: club music presents access to a world of international travel, plentiful drugs, and beautiful strangers; while the noise life offers lightly attended shows in cold basements and all the Xeroxed fanzines about serial killers you can eat. In short, you have to want it, or more accurately, feel it—and Ron Morelli both wants it, and feels it. Morelli is chiefly known as boss of the New York-born, Paris-based techno imprint L.I.E.S., but A Gathering Together is his fourth release for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient/Vatican Shadow man Dominick Fernow. In Fernow, you sense Morelli has found a true bedfellow, one who shares his aesthetic of misanthropy, gutter eroticism, and sonic abrasion.
L.I.E.S.’ take on techno is brackish and lo-fi, and Morelli’s 2013 debut for Hospital, Spit, conformed to type: in broad terms, this was a club record, albeit one with torn clothing and dried blood under its fingernails. A Gathering Together is something more uncategorizable and disassembled. There are occasional hallmarks of dance music—a whoosh of sub-bass here, a vandalized vocal line there—but there will be, as Bill Callahan might have it, no dancing. Rhythms recall mechanical or industrial processes, pitched too fast or too slow for physical interaction. "Desert Ocean" is a hobbled march of throbbing generator tones and bold horn-like blasts that sound like a tanker lost in thick fog. The sounds of "New Dialect" bring to mind a needle puncturing metal, underwater scrapes, and the hiss of compressed gas. "Voices Rise" takes a brief vocal sample and suspends it in limbo with a variety of tics, scratches, and twists, while the miasmic drone of "Cross Waters" sounds like A Guy Called Gerald’s "Voodoo Ray", on fire, being lowered into tar.
This oppositional quality leads you to reflect on Morelli’s personal philosophy. "People are terrible and always have been," he told FACT in an interview two years ago, while the accompanying text for A Gathering Together describes the title track as being born from "rapid-paced dead-end urban environments that force people together." Perhaps the record’s most vivid, evocative cut, it begins with a disorienting field recording, before we hear what sounds like massed ranks of hands taking up percussion instruments and proceeding to beat out increasingly furious polyrhythms. The message seems plain enough—humanity can be horrifying—but there’s a paradoxical quality to its sense of barely corralled frenzy. If there is fear and disgust here, there is also elation and fascination, too—a recognition of life, even if it feels not so much empathetic as anthropological.
Is A Gathering Together a noise record, or not? The mechanistic looping and layering of "The Story of Those Gone" suggests Morelli might be familiar with the output of demented industrial recluses such as Maurizio Bianchi or Atrax Morgue. Equally, however, he might not, these being the sort of sounds you might discover given solitude and the right—that is, wrong—mental state. To Morelli’s credit, Gathering feels detailed and textured where it needs to, its shifting layers crisp and detached rather than blitzed into mulch. But Morelli’s negative energy, when robbed of an unrelenting bass drum, can drift toward monotony.
The idea that techno is more developed, or evolved, than noise is, of course, a false dichotomy. But take Dominick Fernow: his path from Prurient to Vatican Shadow has felt like a progression, opening up his compositional practice in a way that’s informed his many other projects to date. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Morelli, as he drifts from the dance floor, is taking a reverse path, somehow. Consequently, A Gathering Together is a bold move that falls short of being a landmark. But as an illustration of where Morelli might angle his music and label next—not to mention his readiness to confuse, confound, or destroy in order to explore more personal themes or private fancies—it still illuminates.
