Cassette Review: Fabio Crivellaro "Comic Sans terrorist" (Musica Bella)

[€3 // Edition of 50 // https://musicabella.bandcamp.com/album/comic-sans-terrorist]

With a single cassette Fabio Crivellaro has seemingly captured the sounds of all types of cassette-based music that I like and put them into one piece.    On paper, or simply talking about something like this in speculation, this might seem like a bad idea because it could seem like too much or it might not simply work because it would feel too random.   Fabio Crivellaro somehow manages to make this flow to the point where you can never truly be certain what is going to come next but it just works.

What begins with drumbeats and 8bit tones loops into an audio clip of brief words.   This seems to have established where the music is going and as these sort of hip-hop beats come into play next with lasers going through the gears you can't help but feel like maybe it is going to go off track but it's still staying in that general realm of what you thought.    It has this feel of The Prodigy but then it transfers into a distorted rock song ala Dana Fowler And The.    R2D2 intervals come out next before this just becomes flat out groovin' and ends with a hum, a buzz and a banging on the pipes.

Side B opens up with the changing of radio frequencies.   This turns into this beeping rhythm which can become grinding.    An electric guitar laser show comes out next, which is not really something you tend to hear mixed in with the otherwise electronic music that started off this side.    There is an audio clip and then 8bit sounds of levelling up combined with electronic chainsaws.    In perhaps the oddest twist of the cassette the next song comes out with straight up singing and melody like The Beatles.

Through screeching and beats, the sound eventually brings out a woodwind instrument which I believe to be a saxaphone but might also be a clarinet (I'm torn between the two, but leaning towards sax)    It gives off this overall bumblebee feel though, which reminds me of the jazz I sometimes hear and can compare with "Flight of the Bumblebee".   That is until this pure rap section comes through and it's kind of like Cypress Hill and makes me want to shout out "Viva la Raza!" if only because I'm an old school Eddie Guerrero fan.

We come back to that sound of The Prodigy and then after some more spoken words turn into what could be considered Nine Inch Nails-like before the end.    This whole cassette just takes us on such a wild ride and it's just full of so many different genres.    I feel like just the song that I said sounds like The Beatles could be dissected as much as any other cassette and that is just a piece of this puzzle.    This is really, really impressive.