2-track 7" on clear vinyl, released 2009 on Half Machine
"At an unimpressive little venue called the Dome in Tufnell Park last week, we witnessed an event so cataclysmic people will be talking about it in hushed, reverent whispers for years to come. Well, maybe not years, but it certainly lasted the journey home through north London. Folks, MGMT – the Hall & Oates of lysergic noughties guitar pop – got onstage and "jammed" (or whatever the space-rock equivalent of jamming is) with headliner and all-round fuzztone cosmonaut Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, ex-of Spacemen 3 and now head "head" of a group called Spectrum. And of course it was great, predictably so, not to mention weird – you haven't lived until you've seen Messrs Goldwasser and VanWyngarden trying to negotiate the Archway Road on a Friday night.
But do you want to know what's really freaky? What's really freaky is that this historic generational team-up wasn't the greatest thing we saw that night! No, that honour goes to one of the support acts, Banjo Or Freakout, alias 28-year-old Italian expat Alessio Natalizia, a former member of Turin punk-funk trio Disco Drive, who has been living in Hackney since 2005-6 and discovered the joys of laptop music-making while his girlfriend was out one night (and just imagine what might have happened had she stayed in). Armed with some computer gadgetry and aided by a friend on percussion, Natalizia/BOF used loops, samples and mainly programmed (plus some live) sounds to construct the sort of glitchy, ethereally pretty noisepop we've been expecting from the new wave of shoegazers these past few years. The crowd didn't go wild, they were transfixed.
Lo-fi and scratchy, BOF's music is an experimental but potentially accessible merger of tribal beats, dubstep production techniques and luscious pop melodies buried beneath the static and hiss, Natalizia's whispered, wraithlike vocals swirling around the mix like the ghostly progeny of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher – it's no coincidence that the result brings to mind the direction MBV might have taken after Loveless if they'd been immersed in the murky beauty of Panda Bear, Animal Collective and Burial.
Talking of whom, last November, Natalizia recorded covers of tracks by everyone from Burial and LCD Soundsystem to Amy Winehouse and released 11 of them as a CD, limited to just 150 copies and featuring his own hand-made, spray-painted "freakout artwork". Recently, he issued a single on No Pain In Pop, a New Cross-based label responsible for releases by Telepathe and Crystal Castles. Now he's forging ahead with a career that will see him lauded as the missing link between Kieran (Four Tet) Hebden, Fennesz, Kevin Shields, William Bevan and Animal Collective." - The Guardian