SB26-One by Splatterpink

Reissue of Splatterpink’s “ONE” (1992) in beautiful transparent pink cassettes, with original artwork that includes Dee Dee Bombay’s lyrics.

The year is 1990, in Bologna. Three strange individuals meet amid the creative chaos that makes the city buzz: two—D. D. Bombay, who plays bass, and Metello Orsini, who plays guitar—are locals; while drummer Alastair Brison has just left his native Scotland, drawn by the punk rock fame of the city of towers. The three form a band, and in the months that follow, the name Splatterpink echoes ever louder beneath the arcades of Via Zamboni, in the corridors of the university faculties, and within the walls of the city’s social centers. Splatterpink composes unpredictable and hyperkinetic music: as aggressive as hardcore punk and as complex as jazz. In Italy, perhaps in Europe, no one plays like them: their experiments are reminiscent, at most, of the North American ones by their contemporaries Nomeansno and Naked City; but for the Bolognese audience of those years, a Splatterpink concert was more akin, in terms of emotional and cultural impact, to an interplanetary journey.

What’s more, Bombay writes and sings lyrics: and Splatterpink’s tracks, with their odd time signatures and indecipherable structures, are still songs. They bear witness to a youthful desire to shake up a stupid and unjust world, seasoned with just the right dose of irony; and they inevitably bring to mind the earlier hardcore explorations of their older brothers Raf Punk and Nabat, also from Bologna, also interested in finding their own voice, their own language, rather than mimicking slogans invented across the Channel or across the ocean.

In the years to come, Splatterpink made a name for themselves first in their local scene (these were the years of Massimo Volume, Disciplinatha, Starfuckers, and the Underground Records label around which all these acts gravitated; but also of the hip-hoppers of Isola Posse and the industrial madness of Cavalla Cavalla: few cities in the world experienced a ferment similar to that of Bologna…) and then on the Italian scene. The sound of Bombay and company continued to evolve, notably with the arrival of a saxophonist; they were discovered by John Peel, who regularly played them on his BBC show; they performed throughout Italy, winning various awards and competitions; they released a handful of one-off records (most notably *Nutrimi*, released by Underground Records in the mid-1990s). They called a truce in 2001, when all the band members, always in search of new experiences, were involved in too many other projects.

ONE, released in 1992 as a self-produced cassette, captures the very early years of Splatter’s career. It is the only record left by the band’s original lineup, yet it already contains, in embryonic form, nearly all the sound that would follow. The tracks on this little cassette are now absolute rarities: ONE has never been reissued, it doesn’t appear on Discogs, and it’s completely unavailable on online platforms (from YouTube down) where we’re now used to finding everything. Yet it’s already a mature work, no less original or urgent than those that followed it: and Skank Bloc Records has decided to bring it back to life. In addition to the four massive originals, which have simply been remastered, the reissue features a previously unreleased track, the brief and electrifying “Dromedario,” already a staple of Splatterpink’s live setlist back in the day, recorded by D. D. Bombay exclusively during the quarantine months of 2020.

TAPE

released October 15, 2020