Rotorvator

Rotorvator

I Vivi E I Mort

Crucial Blast

I Vivi E I Mort is the debut album from Italian void-gazers Rotorvator, a seven-song blast of blackened electronics, pounding industrial rhythms, deformed black metal and punishing abstract noise issued through Crucial Blast’s Crucial Blaze series. The band’s unique strain of extreme music was first issued via a series of limited cassettes and CDRs on obscure, noise-friendly Italian labels like Dokuro; although Rotorvator’s early works emerged out of the noise / drone underground, their music is unmistakably rooted in black metal. Blistering vocals, blasting tempos and eerily dissonant riffing are woven into their strange, mechanical music, a unique sound that shifts between moments of mutant majesty and vicious chaos. Beginning with the pneumatic industrial rhythms, icy black metal guitars and gothic synthesizers diffused into wavering clouds of nebulous electronics on opener “Ad Sanctos,” Rotorvator begins its descent into angular, blasting violence; the mechanical percussive backbone gives this a rigid, relentless attack that suggests the influence of early mecha-BM pioneers Mysticum and Dødheimsgard, even as the song slips into murky, tectonic breakbeats in its final moments. On tracks like “Domenica,” the black metal elements are consumed into a strange, mutated industrial sound—shuffling breakbeats and eerie electronic ambience wrap themselves around ragged, utterly psychotic vocals and creeping minor key guitars. Elsewhere, the bleak, droning crush of “In Limine” fuses brooding, slow-motion bass thud and sheets of corrosive noise with fractured drum loops, swells of dramatic synthesizer drift and a swirling fog of distant screams. Released as part of the Crucial Blaze series,...