R.I.P. Monte Cazazza

Terrible news today that Monte Cazazza has died! I never knew him personally but both his solo work and his collaborations, in particular his historic role in the founding of industrial music, were of tremendous importance to me. This is a hard one to process. I am very saddened by this. As I said, I never met him, but I do have one personal anecdote. In the early 90s, shortly after my escape from Nova Scotia, one of the first things I did upon arriving in Toronto was to secure a screening of my experimental film work with local film group Pleasure Dome. Thanks largely to PD member/curator Jonathon Pollard, my work was paired with a collection of films and videos by Monte Cazazza that happened to be touring at that time. The screening was called "Industrial Primitive". I was thrilled and honoured to have my work presented alongside that of Monte Cazazza and, needless to say, that screening was hugely significant to me!

No obituary has been posted yet. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Cazazza:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cazazza

- W.A.Davison

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

irr. app. (ext.) + The Recordists

Image
The current irr. app. (ext.) monthly digital single series sees our friend Matt Waldron resurrecting material from the long-defunct Nine Day Antler Society . I wrote about it back in March of this year and you can read that post here . The October edition of the series features a collaboration between irr. app. (ext.) and The Recordists . This is an odd one as The Recordists ( W.A.Davison and S.Higgins ) did not contribute any actual sounds to the recordings. Instead, Matt used some collaboratively written surrealist texts, authored by The Recordists, as the basis for four very funny sound pieces (funny odd AND funny ha ha). https://irrappext.bandcamp.com/album/2023-monthly-digital-single-ndas-revisited-october Needless to say, the other material in the October edition, and the entire series, is great and well-worth checking out! - W.A.Davison
Read more

Bene Gesserit

Image
Bene Gesserit , the music project, that is...not the mystical sisterhood of psychic witches from Frank Herbert's Dune . I could have just as easily tagged this post Human Flesh or Pseudocode or Insane Music or Alain Neffe and Nadine Bal . What I'm talking about is the Belgian artist couple of Neffe and Bal who have produced so much interesting underground, experimental weirdness since the late 70s and early 80s. They're still at it, in fact. Here's an interview with Alain Neffe from 2016: Neffe's label Insane Music was significant in the origins of 80s and 90s cassette culture and was responsible for many interesting projects and collaborations, as well as contributing to the growth of the cassette network itself (mostly by listing the postal addresses of every artist involved with the label). In spite of the significance of their work, however, like a lot of 80s cassette culture it remains obscure and very little written information about Neffe , Bal , or
Read more

irr. app. (ext.) + Six Heads

Image
Pleased as punch that the November digital single from Matt Waldron's irr. app. (ext.) project includes a collaborative track with my old band Six Heads ! https://irrappext.bandcamp.com/album/2023-monthly-digital-single-ndas-revisited-november - W.A.Davison
Read more