Negazione

Negazione was a hardcore punk band based in Turin, Italy during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Formed in 1983, they were one of the most important bands of the hardcore punk scene in Italy at the time, alongside Raw Power, Wretched, Declino and Indigesti.

Among the many groups that in the mid-80s animated the Italian hardcore punk scene Negazione were among the most original. Born in Turin in 1983 by the union of Guido "Zazzo" Bailer (vocals), Roberto "Tax" Farano (guitar) and Marco Mathieu (bass), their line-up would always include these three members, with a continuous rotation of drummers.

Their career began officially in 1984 with the publication of the tape Mucchio Selvaggio , a split cassette with Declino, which was followed by the EP's Tutti Pazzi (Subvert, 1985) and Condannati a Morte nel Vostro Quieto Vivere  (self-released, 1985). These recordings are punk, vulgar and unrestrained, which still gave way for an emotional intensity that would continue to be their trait.

The style of Negazione found it's ultimate expression on the LP, Lo Spirito Continua (De Konkurrent, 1986), thought of as one of the best Italian rock albums of all time. Departing from the path of minimalistic punk, the group are found performing more articulate songs, with sharp changes of tempo and an atmosphere found more often in more "musical" genres. For example, the title track opens with a soft guitar arpeggio that picks up speed until it flows into thrash punk intensity, constantly broken up by mid-tempo changes.  The album stands out in a scene dominated by brakeneck speed riffs and hysterically screamed vocals.  Contributing significantly to the success of the album are the lyrics of Bailer, able to speak to the disillusioned youth whilst at the same time remaining lyrical, angry, poetic and vulgar, cynical and epic.

Little Dreamer (We Bite, 1988) was not as effective. Although the style was the same as the previous album, the creativity behind each song was inferior. Even the albuns best moments, like Il Giorni del Sole, proved to be much more predictable previous efforts.

Even less inspiring are the EP's 1989: Behind the Door (We Bite) and Sempre in Bilico (We Bite). The anthology Wild Bunch (We Bite, 1989) was a collection of the band's early recordings.

100% (We Bite, 1990) proved to be Negazione's swan song. A mixture of the melodic punk of Bad Religion and the grunge of Mudhoney, the record was released at the wrong time:  too late for the alternative public, too early for the mainstream.

The lukewarm reception with which the was album was greeted this album decreed the break up of the band in 1992. Vocalist Guido "Zazzo" Bailer joined Peggio Punx , guitarist Roberto "Tax" Farano began collaborating with Fluxus whilst bassist Marco Mathieu took to music journalism, working for publications such as Metal Hammer and  Rumore.  

Source: Wikipedia.  Biography by Piero Scaruffi, translated by Besatt.

Negazione Discography

Gauze

The original plan according to Shin, the bass player, was to play as fast as possible. They attempted to give the impression of playing fast without actually playing fast. The first Gauze recordings are the tracks from the City Rocker compilation LP with features other New Wave bands and Gauze doing 10 songs. They covered Discharge’s "No TV Sketch", but the song title is "Anti-Machine". They released 1984's Fuckheads LP on ADK Records.

Equalizing Distort was released in 1986. They released the Genkai Wa Doko Da (“What’s the Limit?”) LP in 1989, and in 1991 they played a 10th anniversary gig, where they played three sets covering the 3 periods they had gone through in the last 10 years. They played 51 songs over these 3 sets. In 1996, they began a US tour, though it lasted just three shows - a fourth was scheduled, but was cancelled. They played at Gilman St. in Berkeley, at the Bomb Shelter in Minneapolis and in Chicago at the Fireside Bowl. They also recorded songs for a 7” that came out on Prank a little after this, while they were in SF.

Their 12” Kao O Aratte Denaoshite Koi was released in 1997 (translated as “Go wash your face and come back” - a Japanese expression used after someone is physically beaten by someone else).

Gauze is a long-running and (relatively) prolific group. They’ve released five albums through 2007, though it should be noted that these "albums" never run more than twenty minutes in length.

When I was first getting into hardcore, Gauze was the only Japanese band that anyone knew about. Hilariously, almost every Japanese record reviewed in Maximum Rocknroll would be compared to Gauze, however crazily dissimilar they sounded. 

In fact, Gauze is a terrible frame of reference, because they don’t really sound like anyone else. The only comparable group is maybe Infest, not so much because they sound identical, but the frantic pacing and outlandish vocals share a "sensibility," as they say. Almost all other fast, decidedly unmelodic hardcore runs together, but these two bands are crisp without being over-technical, catchy without sacrificing speed, and aggressively raging without any trace of metal attitude. 

Gauze isn’t an ideal "gateway" band into Japanese punk. One could trace the various members and side-projects of Death Side, in much the same way that a jazz novice can move outward from Miles Davis' sidemen—but Gauze’s is a closed universe. Their influences are obscure to me, even now, and their aesthetic, while baffling, is less over-the-top than, say, G.I.S.M.'s., who once threw an x-ray of a blowjob on an album cover.

Gauze was well known for reasons that made a lot of sense before the internet. Not because they were accessible, musically, but because they had a record on an American label, Prank Records. In 1996, Gauze "toured" the US, playing a handful of shows in far-apart cities, and recorded a six-song EP while on our beauteous shores. 

Even in Japan, where their live sets are essentially "workshops" for new material, Gauze plays rarely. For their 25th anniversary show, they recreated each album meticulously, switching to antiquated instruments and equipment in order to perfectly recreate a sound. This is cutesy when the Cure does it, but strangely moving when Gauze (only slightly younger than the Cure) blast through 50 songs in a single night.

Gauze's idea of hardcore is not sophisticated. It is a blunt instrument. There are no guitar solos, no frills: simply high-speed, tuneless ranting. Unlike much Japanese hardcore, it is not "big." Gauze blows you away, not with 200 Marshall stacks and a fuck ton of dry ice, but through expertly honed riffs and pneumatic precision. The simple goal appears not to be so much to entertain the audience as to outlast and overload them. In the great tradition of punk's antagonism towards its audience, this may be the most subtle and cruel approach of all.

Source: Wikipedia.  Biography by Ben Parker

Gauze Discography

Crass

The brittlest and most hard-line radical of the first wave of British punk bands, Crass issued a blitz of records that were ruthless in both their unrelenting sociopolitical screeds and their amelodic crash of noise. The horrors of war, the arbitrary nature of legal justice, sexism, media imagery, organized religion, the flaws of the punk movement itself -- all were subjected to harsh critique. Like few other rock bands before or since, Crass took rock-as-agent-of-social-and-political-change seriously, and not just in their music. In addition to putting out their own fiercely independent records (though the majors were certainly not knocking at their door), they also formed an anarchist commune that worked with other artists and labels, and on the behalf of various political causes. But they were also afflicted by considerable tension between the medium and its message -- not more than a few thousand people were exposed to Crass' very broad social concerns, and their musical inflexibility guaranteed that the band would be preaching to the converted almost exclusively.

In keeping with early punk ethos, Crass assumed obviously fake stage names. The membership changed a bit over the years, but the group's mainstays were vocalists Steve Ignorant, Eve Libertine, and Joy de Vivre. Drummer Penny Rimbaud and G. Sus, who did tape collages and provided the distinctively bleak black and white artwork on the fold-out posters that usually enclosed their LPs, were also important contributors. Their late-'70s recordings may sound like just so much hardcore punk decades later. But at the time they were indeed shocking assaults of noisy guitars and relentless drumming, backed by throaty, angry rants that were made incomprehensible to many ears by the heavy British accents and the sheer speed of delivery.

They were the definitive uncompromising punk band, which guaranteed them a cult following of very disaffected youth, and also ensured that they would never come remotely close to mainstream exposure, or even to many new wave playlists. An undiluted lyrical message was far more important to Crass than commercial considerations, and until 1984 they cranked out anarchist-leaning recordings without much variation in their attack. Occasional experimental cuts were promising variations on their format, particularly when they branched into tape collage, or spoken poetry. Those were largely the exception rather than the rule, though Crass weren't without the occasional moment of humor.

Crass always intended to disband in 1984, and true to their ideals as always, they did exactly that when that year came around. Even for those with no taste for the band's brand of confrontational punk, they deserve recognition as one of the relatively few acts in the music who attempted to live their values, and not just sing about them.

Biography by Richie Unterberger

Crass Discography