hackedepicciotto
The Best of hackedepicciotto
Live in Napoli
Mute
Transients who refuse to put down roots creatively or existentially, hackedepicciotto — that’s Alexander Hacke, of industrial noisemakers Einstürzende Neubauten, and electronica visionary Danielle de Picciotto, co-founder of the techno festival known as the Berlin Love Parade — was forced to shelter in place by the COVID-19 pandemic. That put in a crimp in the experimental duo’s nomadic lifestyle.
Free again to wander, hackedepicciotto found themselves back in their old stomping grounds of Napoli for a sort of homecoming, playing two enthralling concerts at Auditorium Novecento, among the oldest recording studios in Europe. In curating The Best of hackedepicciotto (Live in Napoli), material was culled from those transformative performances, their shapeshifting, immersive “symphonic drone,” as they themselves call it, building mysterious worlds within worlds and sweeping across dark expanses.
Kindred spirits with Swans and Michael Gira, these two started off in Berlin in the early 2000s, their live outings becoming arty audio/visual spectacles that dazzled and disturbed. Not surprisingly, the immaculate conceptions reimagined here are vividly evocative siren songs, often ominous and sinister. They go off the beaten path into the primeval forest of a doom-laden “Awake,” where a hive of deep, buzzing throat singing circled by chirping birds and strains of methodical guitar and cello follows the spare reading of “Evermore.” Only their rustic, intertwined vocal harmonies are heard in its gloaming.
Neo-folk and gothic elements mingle every chance they get with factory clangor and beats, EDM mayhem, spoken word, and classical drama, as hackedepicciotto takes off on an unsettling gallop through a menacing “Nosce Te Ipsum” and drives into a blizzard of electronic bursts and punches and trilling, elongated strings in the cinematic “Aibach.” Widescreen sprawl and gathering momentum throw forward such similarly cast works as “The Silver Threshold,” its chaotic energy exhilarating, and “The Seventh Day,” a tempest of windy beats, a jazzy, melodic guitar foray, and sleigh bells. They are celluloid heroes.
“I am a stone/Help me be a mountain/I am a mountain/Help me hold the earth,” pleads Hacke in “The Seventh Day,” its sincere yearning a stark contrast to the grim death march of “Jericho” and the washing, skronky “Schwarze Milch,” which evidently translates to black milk in English. Drink it in, if you dare, as The Best of hackedepicciotto (Live in Napoli) would be a startling, yet compelling, initiation for anybody who is unprepared for it. To those already familiar with their wildly inventive alchemy, get ready to find some fresh ideas and unexpected pleasures.
