Recorded on 28 August 1984 at the Japan Japan Festival in Rome and originally issued the following year on the Marz label, Live At "Ex Mattatoio" In Roma captures Friction far from home but fully in their element. Playing inside the former abattoir of the Testaccio district - already a rough, resonant space in the city’s underground - Reck’s group bring the sharpened angles of Tokyo Rockers to a European audience, fusing serrated no‑wave guitar, thick, stalking bass lines, and clipped, incantatory vocals into a sound that feels simultaneously skeletal and crushing. The recording runs a little over an hour, nine tracks that function less as a greatest-hits set than as a continuous pressure field: songs bleed into each other, feedback and crowd noise filling any gaps.
In contrast to the more compact brutality of ’79 Live, here the band have room to stretch. Tempos lurch between taut, post‑punk drive and slower, almost dub‑like passages where the bass is left to prowl under shards of guitar noise and drum figures that sound like a boxer circling their opponent. Even when riffs repeat obsessively, they mutate under the strain of the room: notes bent sharp by adrenaline, hi-hats opening and closing in nervous patterns, vocals sliding from barked slogans into wordless shouts. The mix is rough but legible, with enough air around the instruments to feel the size of the Ex Mattatoio and enough overload to keep the music squarely in the red. You can hear the PA starting to complain, and that friction between control and collapse is the record’s real subject.
The historical context gives the album additional charge. Friction, formed by Reck and Chico Hige after time orbiting the New York no‑wave scene, were among the first Japanese punk outfits to carve out an identity that wasn’t simply a reflection of UK or US models. Bringing that language to Rome in 1984, they land in a continental scene already wrestling with its own post‑punk aftershocks; the Ex Mattatoio show becomes a contact point between parallel undergrounds, Japanese and Italian, both operating in repurposed industrial shells. That’s part of why the album has become a cult item in reissue form, pressed as a Japanese import LP with obi strip and carefully restored audio: it’s not just a band document, but a snapshot of transnational DIY circulation before the internet made such crossings commonplace.
