(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Benestrophe were a group from Austin, Texas, active around 1989 and composed of brothers Dwayne and Gary Dassing and singer Rich Mendez. Two synth-pop cassettes were released by the group, Sensory Deprivation and Red Kross, later compiled into a single CD (by Ras Dva) titled after the first. The songs (Pig Butcher, Endangered Species, Ritual, and the two title tracks) depicted terrible scenes of beings deprived of their humanity, plagues, extraterrestrial invasions, and paranormal events.

After that group disbanded, the Dassing brothers formed Mentallo & The Fixer, shifting toward gothic and industrial music while retaining the hardcore excesses of their previous band. On No Rest For The Wicked (Simbiose), nightmares like Critically Wounded, Schizoid Embolism, Telepath, and Lunatik stand out; the titles say it all about their program. Even as one of the most violent works in the genre, it does not forsake melody.

Revelations 23 (Zoth Ommog, 1993) is a milestone in the history of electronic rock. The duo’s percussive style is announced by Ancient Languages, which hints at connections to the prehistory of human communication, while simultaneously pairing it with the screams of the damned, foreshadowing nothing good for the future of that prehistory. A vast and tragic electronic veil towers over the relentless ticking of the rhythm box and the chaotic percussion hiccups of Legion Of Lepers. More melodic and danceable, Fusion Mutation recalls the robotic pop of Gary Numan—albeit with infinitely darker tones—and Skinny Puppy. This track, along with Amplitude Interferences, represents the “lighter” side of the album. Pulse Emhorrage returns to the center of action with its driving, martial polyrhythmic crescendo and a backdrop of scattered noises. The melody is fragmented within the percussivity, as if a jackhammer were intoning the “Ave Maria.” Gradually, the music focuses on visions of immense crowds marching toward distant hells. All vocals are distorted, becoming another instrument in the harmony rather than a literary reference. Inhumanities is at once the track closest to the rock song format—where the singing is strongest and clearest—and the track with the most violent, unpleasant sounds, bordering on hip hop and heavy metal. In Cerebral Statik Overdose, the mass of distortion, torrential rhythms, and symphonic elements works in two opposing directions on the harmony: on one hand making it more solid, on the other hand shattering it. The final grand orgy is Grim Reality, where electronics have become a faint, mournful lament, while apocalyptic dissonances and sampled voices rise to the forefront. The rhythm remains sharp, syncopated, and oppressive.

Where Angels Fear To Tread (Zoth Ommog, 1994) is another monumental album (one hour and fifteen minutes). The harmonies have become even more complex, and the production more professional. At times, the space now allowed to dissonance is limitless, the rhythms increasingly convulsive and intricate, and the vocals a purely deformed sound. Not by chance, the introduction, Gargantua, consists of two minutes of pure chaos. The longest track and most terrifying scene, Bring To A Boil, starts from that luxuriant chaos of electronic effects: the filtered and distorted groan is lost in a mass of percussive noise that gradually takes shape with driving sequencers and metallurgic syncopations of the rhythm boxes. However, this monstrous side of the album is amply balanced by a lighter side, the first concession to listenability, from the atmospheric techno of Sacrilege to the most conventional song of their career, Atom Smasher, bordering on synth-pop. The instrumentals Virtually Hopeless and Abominations Unleashed fuse Gary Numan’s robotic electro-pop with Brian Eno’s sci-fi vignettes. Even in this field, Mentallo remain innovative: not only does the use of synthesizers and sequencers give a sense of the ’70s, but the rhythmic fractures and conflicts (as if attempting to merge techno and hip hop, Kraftwerk and Cabaret Voltaire) forge a new form of electronic dance music, constantly in motion—sometimes neurotic (Coward), sometimes feverish (Afterglow), but always unstable, unbalanced, excessive. The album is actually less melodic than the previous one, and when melody takes over it is almost always in a gothic guise, as in the macabre Ruthless, the grotesque march of Decomposed, and the organ crescendo of Afterglow. All of this brushes against the formalism of classical music in the instrumental Battered States Of Euphoria, which not only represents the romantic peak of the album but also the pinnacle of their art of rhythmic and melodic counterpoint.

A parallel project by Dwayne and Gary is the Mainestahi (with singer Michael Greene), whose album is titled Out To Lunch.

Just like the previous one, Algorythum (Metropolis, 1999) is basically a solo album by Gary Dassing, and it builds on previous ideas without completely succeeding in expanding them.