Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata

condition (records/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

A-001. The catalog number tells you everything. An act of total autonomy - the debut LP of T.A.C. (Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata) was the first and only release of Azteco Records, a label the band created and ran themselves from Parma in 1983. It pressed, it circulated in near silence, and it disappeared. One of the genuine holy grails of Italy's early-eighties underground.

Founded in Parma in 1981, T.A.C. assembled five members around the multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Simon Balestrazzi - who would later emerge within Kirlian Camera and Kino Glaz - alongside Andrea Azzali, Giorgio Barbuti, Fabio Cortesi, and Giampaolo Terenziani. Recorded on 8-track at Studio Veronica in October 1983, the album dropped into a specific moment: post-punk's energy was curdling into something harder to name, and a handful of Italian groups were absorbing signals from the UK and Germany - the early industrial convulsions of Throbbing Gristle, the surrealist provocation of The Residents, the dismantled no-wave of New York - and processing them through a distinctly local sensibility.

What emerged is not comfortable listening, and was never intended to be. The guitar - crunchy, corroded, rhythmically fractured - recalls the no-wave attack of Fred Frith's Massacre, but routed through something more volatile, more Italian in its theatrical instability. Beneath it, funk-punk bass lines supply a telluric undertow, bony and deconstructed, shifting meter without warning. Then the electronics arrive: polluted radio frequencies, background buzzes, synthesizers deployed not as atmosphere but as interference - an eerie, dismantled static that unsettles whatever structural footing the listener has managed to find. The Nurse With Wound comparison is inevitable and accurate, though T.A.C. carry a different kind of urgency - less British eccentricity, more the sound of five people in a Parma studio in 1983 with something to prove and no category to prove it in. The original press is deeply scarce. An essential document of Italian experimental music, and of a scene that is still, slowly, giving up its secrets.