The 8 bit Prometheus reviewed by Neural.it

Italian Neural magazine reviewed The 8 bit Prometheu by Dj Balli + L’Allievo + MC Shell8bit. Enjoy nice reading.

The 8 bit Prometheus

Dj Balli, with the help of Allievo and MC Shell8bit, presents this 17-track album for the Slovakian label Urbsounds. The compositions are rigorously titled “séance”, and progressively numbered. Underscored by the declamatory voice, the sounds are like the low resolution of old electronics games such as the Game Boy, amplified and followed by rhythmical elements that are somewhere in between post-techno, breakcore, and gabber in style. In The 8-bit Prometheus, a subject prevails over the others: a melting pot of circuit bending and rave culture influences.

The track also displays certain contamination between noise and sampled elements, the result of an artisanal mash-up. All these movements pervaded the underground spirit of squats and illegal events. The collision between a musically rough approach and some abstract and conceptual energy is a strong point for Balli. He is a polyhydric artist and a deep lover of counterculture, who has contributed to the literary field too, with books and articles for the “noise and politics” fanzine. Aesthetics and cultural development for him go hand in hand and the mix of different genres is naturally connected to his research, resulting from marginal but highly prolific sectors of artistic production. Dj Balli is the author of a book, Frankenstein, or the 8 Bit Prometheus, an arcade version of the famous novel by Mary Shelley, a mediumistic session where he evokes the spirit of Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834), credited as the source of inspiration for the modern Prometheus. Dj Balli is definitely a multimedia experimenter: his narrations crossover into a performance version, a radio-play with live performances, which took place in the basements of Galleriapiù (Bologna, Italy) and was broadcast live on www.ohcristo.com. We also need to highlight the project’s graphic design by Tobia Maschio. An illustrator permeated by the same counter-cultural mutations as Balli, his design is vintage and modern at one and the same time, in perfect harmony with the spirit of the edition.