Relistening V - 3/4 Had Been Eliminated, A Year of Aural Gauge Operation

In comparison to the other albums that I have been re-listening, this album from the ‘3/4 Had Been Eliminated’ isn’t only an attempt to observe if my understanding of listening has changed, but also to enjoy once more this album. And at the end of this album, although my initial thoughts are that it is an album based on electro-acoustic music a lot, there seem to be more melodic parts. 

The first time I listened to a track of the ‘A Year of the Aural Gauge Operation, it was in 2005, which exceeds once more the 10 year limit I had set on my re-listening experiences. It was also the year that the album was released from the Finnish music label, Häpna. This particular label seems to be quite friendly to Italian artists, since other releases include Andrea Belfi’s ‘Between Necks and Stomach’ a year later after this release, with member of ‘3/4 Had Been Eliminated’ featuring on this release.

I remember that I was in Stoke-on-Trent on the university campus and listening to one of the most influential radio shows on Resonance FM, Frequenzen presented by Alexander Wendt, which it stopped broadcasting many years ago. I had a Siemens laptop with quite bad speakers, and listened to the show several times so that I could keep track of the name of the band and this track.

So, ‘3/4 Had Been Eliminated’ is an Italian band, featuring some of the most well-known artists in the Italian experimental scene, such as Stefano Pilia and Valerio Triccoli. The other two members are Tony Arrabito and Claudio Rochetti. There are many Italian experimentalists, such as Andrea Belfi, and it was also an era that the post-rock movement had influenced and gave rise to many post-rock bands.

The album has a lo-fi aesthetic, and inside the inner sleeve it is mentioned that the album was recorded in their flat in Bologna. The listener can found a lot of field recordings, voices humming and whispering in the background, and various instruments, such as electric guitar, double bass, and drums. The opening track of the album is the ‘Widower’, which starts very slowly with long guitars, drums, tape loops, which resembles to an opening track, although a bit longer in duration. The ‘Monkey Talk’ is the closest to a track with lyrics, compared to other tracks that contain voices as part of the recording experience. In general, it sounds more like a rhythmic track and the dark atmosphere mostly comes from the quality of the recording. The presence of guitars and drums is much more prevalent to the rest of the album, and perhaps the fastest track of the album.

The 6^th track of the album, ‘Loop Recorder in the Patient with Heart Disease’ is a type of preparation for my favorite track and the one I was introduced in their music is the ‘In Every Tree a Heartache’. There is a background noise, possibly coming from a turntable, while a guitar is stretching with low-tempo drums. The recorded voices are hard to discern what are the words that are being used in repetition. Possibly it isn’t a member of the band, since this is a female voice, and most likely comes from another recording or sample.

I’m not sure in what genre the music ‘3/4 Had Been Eliminated’ mainly belong to. Putting things in to the hugely broader genre of experimental music would be a huge simplification. Their titles are very long and so being the duration of their tracks, and for some people would put it into a post-rock band, especially with the presence of guitars and drums. Maybe in a more free, slow, and quite post-rock listening. However, the presence of Triccoli and Pilia makes it hard to make them a post-rock band. So, for once more let’s just say that they are a band expanding and challenging various music genres.