Mark Anderson & Anthony Guerra - Roma LP

Mark Anderson and Anthony Guerra return with ROMA, deepening and refining their potent compound of textural crunch, ruminative chords and tortured vocalisations. While the pair also work in other modes—see the unedited in situ performance captured on their Regional Bears tape—ROMA returns to the carefully layered voice and sound constructions pioneered on Earth Diffusion (Index Clean, 2024). Inspired by Pasolini’s blasted visions of the Italian capital in the desolate post-WWII years, ROMA is by turns disturbing, hypnotic, and bracingly unhinged. While the music is basically electroacoustic in construction, even more than on Earth Diffusion the twelve two-to-four-minute cuts here land as songs, each ‘setting’ Anderson’s voice in a different way.
 
The voice speaks, sometimes clearly, at other moments comprehensible only in flashes; even when it moans or wails, it seems haunted by language, by the need to say something. Like a Poundian ideogram or a shadow box by Joseph Cornell, each track coheres against the odds. Disparate elements—voice, clattering loops, repeating synth patterns, snatches of prehistoric flute —are brought together in a contained environment. The sonic objects bring with them their own space, near to or far from the listener, their coexistence creating disorienting, dreamlike effects. Each track plays in its own way with the ability of harmonic material to colour the other elements, to lend to location recordings, closely mic’d texture or unidentifiable hiss a range of tones from meditation to desperation. The whole assemblage is heard through a veil of tape saturation and grime that blurs and distances much of what we hear, while also lending certain elements a seductive tactility. When identifiable field recordings appear, they feel less abstract than elemental, like sudden openings to reality.
 
At points the music reduces to nothing more than vocal mumbles and distant knocks enveloped in wafting hiss, yet somehow an emotive heft endures. For anyone interested in the farthest reaches of the song-form—think Jandek, late Shadow Ring, the Cavafy Songs of Nikiforos Rotas, or the wild outer limits of contemporary hip-hop mavericks like Cities Aviv—ROMA is essential listening. Unfailingly top-notch, as Jos said. – Francis Plagne, 2026.