(Dead Angel) The album title is certainly appropriate: on the first track, "Signs of Liberation for Wandering Souls," all the equipment at the band's disposal sounds like it's breaking down, along with the recording equipment and maybe even the room where the recording takes place. The band employs drums, electric guitar, sax, and a mix of tape and computer electronics to create the sound of a free (extremely free) improv band fighting their way through an ocean of malfunctioning equipment, and the resulting sound is every bit as unpredictable and chaotic as such a description suggests. Things get a bit less frantic on "That This Putrid Air Does Not Pollute Our Clean Faces," with spells of silence between the chaos and a moderately more subdued approach to noise pollution, although the sax bleats do sound unnervingly like a person undergoing serious gastronomic distress and the track's sheer randomness is every bit a match for the opener. The remaining four tracks are every bit as eccentric and noise-laden as the first two, with a consistently willful defiance implicit in their struggle to avoid sounding "normal" at all costs. As with most Eh? releases, this is strictly for people in love with the sound of sound; come to this expecting structure, melody, or conventional thinking and you will be sorely disappointed, but if you're looking for a cacophonous display of free will through the joy of beating and bleating, well, this just might be your ticket out of Squaresville. - RKF
(Sound Projector) Strongly Imploded are a loopy Italian quartet of players noted also here. On Twilight of Broken Machines (EH?58) they summon up an unholy cacophony with their unique live improv setup of guitars, saxophones, tape recorder, drums, and feedback. There’s a no-input setup to generate feedback, and a more complex feedback system which uses loudspeakers and drums in some ungodly fashion, as if devised by the bastard child of Max Neuhaus. Even Mario Gabola’s saxophone is made to feedback in some way. If this description gets your mouth watering in anticipation of an album full of loud dissonant squeals, you might be surprised at the degree to which these four young men manage to harness and control all the rampant feedback that was slithering around their basement performance space in Naples in 2010 and 2011. If they could pour it into jars and export it as a form of pickled jam, I’m sure they would. Midway between extreme free improv and harsh noise their music sits more or less, as fidgety as a schoolboy sent to a year below his normal grade, and bearing all the attendant resentment against authority you might expect from that scenario. Strongly Imploded flail and crash with frustration and raw anger as they create their percussion-heavy outbursts, throwing a controlled tantrum and wallowing in their own bitter puke. I always enjoy their surreal and contrived track titles, but even these seem to be dripping with attitude and sarcasm. How grotesque we have become, indeed. - Ed Pinsent
(Monsieur Délire) Thanks go to microlabel eh? for allowing me to discover this Italian noise improvisation quartet. Electric guitar, drums, Revox/no-input mixing board, and sax/feedback. Five short tracks (4-7 minutes), powerful, punchy, brimming with life and strength. High-energy yet focused free improvising. I’m quite impressed, especially with “Bad boys who were born wrong,” where Strongly Imploded get everything right. - François Couture
(Vital Weekly) Italy’s four piece Strongly Imploded had a release on Gruenrekorder before. The band has members from One Starving Day, Weltraum and A Spirale: F. Gregoretti (drums), M. Gabola (reeds), M. Argenziano (guitar) and SEC_ (synth and electronics). Here too we have a combination between free jazz (drums and reeds) and free noise (guitar and electronics). However where Dislocation is doing something that I think is a bit old fashioned, Strongly Imploded with their strongly added value of electronic sounds, brittle and sharp, add something quite nice to the existing chaos and mayhem of free improvisation. An excellent release by a band who’d one wish to see live. - Frans de Waard
(Aiding & Abetting) Some Italian noise merchants who are apparently attempting a critique of an Italian book about either socialist economics or AIDS. I really can't make heads or tails of the liners, but the squalls are awesome. This is noise that actually tells a story (and not about economics or AIDS, to my ears). This storm surges. - Jon Worley
(Deaf Sparrow) We here at Deaf Sparrow, actually specifically me in this case, reviewed Strongly Imploded's why use a proxy? some months back. Though not necessarily a great review, it wasn't bad, and neither was the album, functioning as, to quote myself loosely, a hive of hornets that occasionally came together and other times just sat there buzzing around from a distance. Strongly Imploded are still going the free improv/jazz/non-music route, and their newest release isn't much different from why use a proxy?. Well, actually, if you check out the score above in comparison, it's obvious something was done a little better here. How? How is it possible to essentially do the same thing and pull ahead? Call it experience, call it adjustment, or just call it dumb luck. Twilight of Broken Machines is another romp into collective land with several musicians on different instruments and objects that essentially jump into the pool before learning to swim and hope the doggy paddle will suffice until they figure out the rest of the strokes. Surprisingly, their technique comes off better this time, even though it's the same sort of process. Strongly Imploded take many of the same sounds from before and do the same thing with them. The saxophonist flaps his tongue on the reed, the guitarist goes from feedback to frantic plucking with no intended purpose other than sound, and someone works power electronics through a bunch of pedals. They take it all together, jump right in, and slowly stuff comes out of it. A little more vocal contortioning has been added this time around, which was generally absent before, so instead of sounding like just a nest of wasps, it sounds more like a nest of wasps hit by an ignoramus with a bat; they commence to swarm about this head and sting him as he mumbles and screams incoherent sounds. Somehow, though, Twilight of Broken Machines manages to take the same approach as its predecessor with just a little more structure, and this is key, though it's likely they're not entirely sure how it happened. See, if it weren't for what feels like intentional direction to most of the tracks, Strongly Imploded would have largely given us the same release. For the most part you won't find much form, but these Italian jazz freakos have found a way to add just enough drum patterning, a little stronger and more varied electronics, and just the right amount of rambling non-vocals that you'll find yourself listening to it in more depth. Unfortunately, it stops there, and what holds Twilight of Broken Machines from greatness is it's the same format they used previously and it seems they just got lucky this time around. It's like watching Part VIII out of the Friday the 13th films, you know what to expect, it's just a matter of what object is used to do it. Were Strongly Imploded to go further with their sound, apply just enough meaning to their work, it would sound a hell of a lot better. Randomness is fun, but usually only for a few goes, after that it's just what it is, random, and without at least a bit of structure, your brain tires and your attention goes back to more interesting things. For the most part, you can chock up anything interesting going on in Twilight of Broken Machines to plain old luck; things just happened right at the right times certain times and they rode with it. So, these guys are getting there, they've taken their chaos to the level it needed to go, but it's probably accidental, and it won't be possible to tell unless they can show us in a future release they can take all of this undirected energy and pull it together into a noise jam session with moments of continuity. We're not asking for everything to have a pattern, because that would ruin the idea, but just a bit, just a little would make it more worth your while. As it stands, Twilight of Broken Machines goes further than their previous work, but it's not there yet. - Arkus
(Kathodik) O anche, Oddly Imploded e Grizzly Imploded. Cambian alcuni attori, ma il risultato non muta. Impro free rock, catastrofico e metropolitano. Libero, feroce, matematico e da tempo svezzato. Dove interscambiabili son gli stati di attesa e rilascio. Facce della stessa medaglia. Straziate memorie Ayler, la guerra lampo dei Borbetomagus, l'impossibile fatto carne dei This Heat (concettualmente, la stessa finestra, dentro/fuori, fuori/dentro). Ma anche, le traballanti impalcature dei Voice Crack, le verticalità dei Sightings, l'urto degli Aufgehoben. Umidità e noia. Letteraria, crudele reazione. Con un palco, senza palco. Disoccupazione, nulla. La perdita di tempo che il nulla comporta. Il fare, la sua esposizione ad ogni ben di Dio di tossina, gratuita e non richiesta. Non hai altro, cazzo vuoi! Te; li vuoi 800/700/600/500 euri al mese? Li vuoi? Perché ne trovo altri mille come te, anche a molto meno. Spingi la carretta. Sfiancati, vai in motorino con tutta la famiglia sul sellino. Brama qualcosa che non sai, poi muori. Di nuovo, cazzo vuoi? Non è semplice brutismo. Non c'entra nulla, semplificarlo in noise. Nulla è casuale. O almeno, loro, sanno dove andare. Sbattere contro un muro, ancora ed ancora. Prima o poi, qualcosa accadrà. Al muro o alla testa. Radical Disruption Of The Present ed Astute Prophets Of False Truth, letteralmente, raggelano. Da Napoli, chitarra, batteria, un Revox, no-input feedback, laptop, sax ed i suoi feedback, sfasciume elettronico. Maurizio Argenziano, Francesco Gregoretti, SEC_, Mario Gabola. Nulla è casuale, e nel frattempo, la pelle avvizzisce. Si chiama vita sapete? - Marco Carcasi
