*2022 stock.* Black Sun Productions' new album for Old Evropa Cafe consists of 14 tracks of tribal electronica and it stands as the most rhythmic output to date coming from Massimo & Pierce and their fellow Children of the Black Sun. The wooden sound of the marimba in combination with flutes and drums merging with very European sounding violins will reveal to the listener a new and pleasantly suprising attitude in musick-making of this collective of sound artists. The mutating precision of Pierce’s electronics is here counterpointed by Massimo's sonorous, deep vocals. Eschewing the melancholy of the double disc The Impossibility of Silence, Black Sun Productions seems to have moved with Chemism into an electronic semi-operatic mode. Some of the album's tracks were written and performed in collaboration with draZen and Bahntier. Chemism features Val Denham and Ariot Fleischmann on additional vocals, Roman Hollenstein on drums and Roberto Budelo on violins. Chemism is possibly the most original sonic statement of Black Sun Productions and it consacrates Massimo & Pierce as a truly eclectic duo of performers and producers. Coming into a 3 panels digipack fully illustrated by Jacopo Camagni and Marco Felicioni of Studio Dronio.
Dedicated to William S. Burroughs on the 10th anniversary since his death, Chemism is largely inspired by William S. Burroughs' 1969 novel The Wild Boys.
The Wild Boys introduces several themes into the author's magical universe: the struggle to escape the mechanisms of social control; the search for transcendence of the biological trap of duality, and the narrator's ability to rewrite (and thereby destroy) his own past. The Wild Boys, subtitled "A book of the dead" has been described by some critics as a homosexual version of 'Peter Pan'. Set in an apocalyptic near-future, The Wild Boys contrasts the struggle between the remnants of civilisation which exist in totalitarian enclaves and the wild boys - a revolutionary tribe of youths who exist in a utopian, instinctual state. The wild boys exist outside of the conventions of civilisation, free from the control mechanisms of religion, nation, family and 'normal' sexuality. A magical universe, where rigorous training in guerrilla tactics leads towards specialised biological mutations; where the total gratification of desire creates a magical technology of liberation.
The wild boys themselves live as a tribe - without leaders or hierarchy but with a shared group consciousness. Rather than being individual characters, they are a manifestation of all that is repressed in civilised society, in particular, the forces we know as Eros and Thanatos. In the novel, the wild boys periodically explode into orgies of wild, unstoppable violence or lust. Through the use of drugs and sex, the wild boys discover a magical technology of restoring the dead to life, and so free themselves from biological dependence on women, birth, and death. Lacking an individual sense of self, they can cross to and from the land of the dead and exist in a liminal state between the worlds. They are, within Burroughs' magical universe, a male-only version of the maenads, representing the chaotic power of instinctual desire when manifested in a living form. Also, they can be likened to the ancient Greek Pan, manifesting as the call to the wild, which reaches out to the susceptible. In The Wild Boys, the image of a smiling wild boy becomes a hugely popular media icon which spreads the wild-boy virus across civilisation, causing more and more youths to join the wild boys.
The wild boys are a utopian (perhaps dystopian) fantasy, but that is the whole point. As an articulation of Burroughs' need to escape the confines of modern culture, he has created a beachhead into an alternative dream. The wild boys present not only a homoerotic fantasy of immediate sexual gratification, but also the potentiality to be a space where new forms of 'otherness' might develop.
- Phil Hine, 2000
