After years spent in developing their peculiar sound and aesthetic and releasing tons of split albums in the most forgotten corners of the web, ENJOYABLE MUSIC have landed on Musica Orizzontale label with their new full length, delivering a mix of synthetic noisecore, melancholic digital ambient and a wide array of deranged electronica. Together with the album they presented “Art Itself Vomits”, a perpetual art exhibition curated by the duo, their new offering comes as an intriguing body of art that we’re thrilled to explore in detail.
Enjoyable Music occupies a peculiar place in the under-underweb of music producers. Since late 2016 they devoted themselves to actively placing their sounds in the most forgotten corners of the web. Much like the Factory from Thomas Ligotti’s The Red Tower short story, they tirelessly worked to craft weird and twisted sounds and stealthily entrust them to dark internet pages. In these years, the members of Enjoyable Music have dedicated themselves to some sort of mutated cyber-grindcore which incorporates many stylemes; their cyber attitude is much closer to an experimental noise-rock weirdness than to a gabber-infused metal subgenre. Bad on purpose, their aesthetical guerrilla usually remains concealed even to the most nerdy bandcamp dweller.
This is one of the few Enjoyable Music’s full-lengths, most of their discography consisting of split albums. “A Liturgy Of Wires” summarizes the whole Enjoyable attituded towards sound: a despicable cauldron of synthetic black metal, abrasive noisecore bursts, melancholic digital ambient and a wide array of deranged electronica. They are loyal to their sonic ethos, which aims not to mutilate the urge to create with value-oriented impositions. The titles of the tracks are often sub-products of reflections about the whole Enjoyable Music project, emanating from meditations about the personal meaning of the practice of music-making.
“Enjoyable Music was born in late 2016 essentially as a by-product of our inability to give a coherent form to the kind of music we wanted to produce.” – comments the band.
“We had the drive to make music, but the results always tended to be very poor compared to our expectations, given our lack of knowledge of the means by which music is produced. After a certain massive amount of frustration, somewhere along the way we encountered the concept of Enjoyable Music. And here is the Great Liberator. That is: music is servant to life and not the contrary. That is: the urge to create is a flow in which we are dragged. Nobody says that the motion is in the object, but that the object is in motion. The urge to create is unasked and to a certain extent unwanted; at that point, the space of choice opens up as to whether to channel or suppress this urge. From this point of view, Enjoyable Music starts from the desire not to mutilate the urge to create but rather to let it flow in its joyful incoherence. Personally, more than a musical project, E. M. has been an existential device, a tool to deactivate a painful urge – to create in spite of a bad musical result and lack of appreciation whatsoever. It is probably not a particularly original concept, and there are ideas behind other bands that pragmatically respond to the same need.”
Asked about their inspirations, their continue: “The biggest part of influence with regard to Enjoyable Music‘s sound comes from the kind of bizarre cybergrind that could be found on some netlabels of the time, first of all in that incredible mixture of aggressive sounds that was Grindcore Karaoke. While both of us certainly came from periods of synthetic drum grindcore mania in the wake of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, later on what flowed into our sound were definitely obscure bands from equally obscure netlabels. It was a time of gonzo internet wandering of the strangest sounds we could get our ears on. In particular, I personally fondly remember the impact of wecamewithbrokenteeth and A Cellophane Jackal – the latter, a guy from Las Vegas I think, later produced our S/T on Minidisc on his Art Fraud Media label.”
“In short, our sonic fuel was that sort of digital experimentalism carried on with a punk spirit that distorted – often with bizarre rather than successful results – the stylistic elements of grindcore. At any rate, although we wanted to make a kind of cybergrind, we only heard the biggest names in this genre much later and already with a certain amount of detachment. Today, there are projects like Fire Toolz that have taken cybergrind to a stage of cultured experimentation at the highest level. Our inspiration and our ideal location is rather among clueless people who don’t really know what they are doing.”
Speaking about their cooperation with the label, the band admits: “What is really special about this record is rather the fundamental contribution of Musica Orizzontale. I think that’s something you only realise when you have to present yourself to an audience through a label. The amount of time and effort that people put into an underground label is really incalculable. They are always to be supported and deeply respected, because it is basically thanks to people like that that we have a lot of music out there produced with a lot of passion. In short: Long live Musica Orizzontale.”
The album comes with a perpetual art exhibition “Art Itself Vomits”. The installation consists of a virtual environment that can be explored at will, and whose focal point is a 3D statue that can be admired while walking freely through the exhibition. As a soundtrack to the virtual room, the unique ambient music “Mock Muzak~Relaxing Interior Loop~~” adds an additional digital content. There is a hidden mechanism within the digital environment that perfectly expresses the essence of the installation.
“The digital exhibition ‘Art Itself Vomits‘ is something we have thought about for a while.” – comments Enjoyable Music. “We have always been drawn to the idea of creating a kind of digital dungeon that is somehow separate from the rest of the digital content or virtual spaces that can be found on the web; a kind of secret, undiscovered place that, if you can find it in the constant flood of content, you can explore with some degree of sense of discovery. Plus, we wanted to add, somehow, new dimensions to the standard album object. So we set out to create this kind of digital island whose virtual existence is separate from the rest of the web. The form that this digital space has taken is that of a contemporary art exhibition that you can explore while enjoying the main sculpture. The theme of the exhibition is the aesthetic indecency that accompanies our sonic exploits: Art Itself Vomits. Inside the exhibition you can unearth a secret mechanism that well explains the concept behind the room’s idea.”
Lastly, we asked the band to give us some firm recommendations and other heavy hitting music worth a check, and here’s what we’ve got.
Spaccastronzi
Heroes of our local scene. A family more than a band.
st.grimes
Shoutout to a great friend and great DJ. Incidentally, he supported Enjoyable Music a lot, at a time when we could do even less than we do now.
Holy Molar
One of the greatest inspirations for our sounds. As we write the news of his passing arrives. In memory of Gabe Serbian.
