In
1997 Mark Iacona (drums, percussions, synth and sampling) and Fausto
Balbo (synth, sampling, self-made musical instruments and live
electronics), started to play a series of free sessions, fired by their
curiosity and their interest in experimentation. The MARFAUS project
began from those sessions. The name is an acronym formed from their
names, Mark and Fausto, but in addition, in some dialects, MARFAUS
means FALSE SEA. The initial performances took place in a conventional
recording studio, but soon the duo started to recording in unusual
places: the depths of the woods, old farmsteads and abandoned
warehouses. Instead of using normal instruments, they began to play on
just about everything they could lay their hands on: branches, stones,
tools, bottles, water tanks, pipes and other objects. The only
electronic device used was a DAT recorder capable of recording their
sounds. After listening carefully to the recordings, the duo decided to
use some parts of them to create a sort of AUDIO-MOVIE in which several
peoples’ stories mix and intersect: they wanted to describe everyday
life, feelings, and the perversions that exist inside and outside the
home. MARFAUS took the plot of this audio-movie from various existing
narratives, searching through television shows and finding some
interesting dialogues from FLORENCE MONSTER'S TRIAL, interviews made
with hookers, and samples from movies such as THE BIRDS (Hitchcock,
1963), THE GRANDE BOUFFE (Ferreri, 1973) and the cult porn film DEEP
THROAT (Gerard, 1972). From there, the duo brought a degree of order
and meaning to all those words and samples, and then began to cut,
blend and manipulate the sounds using all the devices they had. The
final result was a CD titled GENTE COMUNE, self-published in 2004, also
featuring John Pearce (ex Family Fodder) who plays the piano on tracks
1-6. This CD was packaged using hand-crafting techniques. Every copy
has a case made of grey matting, branded with a heat-embossed MF logo.
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