WEDNESDAY 2 | It’s not what you’re thinking. ‘Fukte’ isn’t a black metal gorefest, and it’s pronounced the Italian way: fooc-tay, so you can stifle that smirk. But Euro-pop it is not. Expect instead a guttural, moaning, meandering arc of hiss and reverb. Over a base of angle cutters, evaporators, waiting-room hubbub and Venetian motorboats, artist Fabrizio De Bon lays live tracks using customised amps and oscillators. He aims to construct “audio stories – pieces with a head, a body and a tail.” Devised by another Italian, ’20s futurist Luigi Russolo, the ‘harsh noise’ genre “isn’t everyone’s cup of tea” concedes De Bon, who’s bringing his Fukte routine to Phnom Penh in October. “But it’s not a random collection of sounds,” he elaborates. “It’s a flow that people can follow from beginning to end… narratives they must create themselves.” Hailing from the tiny Alpine town of Beluno, De Bon discovered ‘harsh noise’ after an accidental CD purchase. He started experimenting and after five years of “growing personally with the sound” began performing live. Despite a background in computer science, his is a back-to-basics approach. A vegetarian, non-smoking environmentalist, De Bon eschews digital composition (“click, click, click and staring at a monitor”) for the knob-twiddling analogue grind. He’s not even packed a laptop. Under no illusions that everyone is going to like his style, De Bon is disarmingly self-deprecating about the reception he could get in Southeast Asia. “I don’t want to play to audiences of thousands,” he admits. “I don’t pretend people will like my work, but I’d like them to think about it.”
WHO: Fabrizio de Bon and a big deck of knobs
WHAT: An audio story of harsh noise
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 9pm October 2
WHY: You didn’t know music could sound like this