Bruno Cossano

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Paste-on cover. Insert included.

Bruno Cossano is one of the less-remembered masters of Italian power electronics, a contemporary of Maurizio Bianchi and Pierpaolo Zoppo (Mauthausen Orchestra) who released four cassettes across the Eighties and appeared on the key compilations of the period (including Hate's Our Belief on Aquilifer Sodality) before falling quiet. Live In Paris, recorded in concert on 4 September 1986, is his most concentrated single document, issued on cassette that year and finally pressed to vinyl by the Dutch Dead Mind Records imprint in 2011.

Six pieces, six sides of the Italian DIY industrial imagination at its least categorisable. "Debacle (Ouverture)" opens the set; "Criminal Monsters (Suite)," "Orgias De Sangre," and "Saffo's Pleasures (Suite)" extend the logic; "Le Grand Supplice" carries on; and the closer is a remake of Mauthausen Orchestra's "Conflict" that situates Cossano's project squarely inside the small network of Italian power electronics he belonged to.

The sonic palette sits where Luigi Russolo's bruitist inheritance meets the Whitehouse model of weaponised analogue electronics, with a dash of over-saturated pseudo-African drumming and tape-echoed shouting that feels closer to Stockhausen than to the Come Organisation. Pretty much anything was legitimate in the Italian DIY industrial scene of the era, and Cossano took full advantage. A reference document for any shelf of Italian industrial obscurities.