Logo #50: Maurizio Bianchi

Italian avantgardist Maurizio "MB" Bianchi presents us with the fiftieth logo on the big show. First appearing on the "Symphony for a Genocide" record in 1981, it's a runic representation of letters M and B placed in the two divided hemispheres of the brain. Yet no matter how hebephrenic things get, there again is the all-encompassing circle. At some point in the early 1980s, we are told, Bianchi quit experimental music for the much calmer vales of witnessing for Jehovah. Imagine MB showing up with his brothers and sisters on your doorstep before noon to tell you the Good News! Bianchi asserts, "Bear in mind that this is not religious propaganda oriented on a way of sullen proselytism. It is just the pure expression of my hidden, deep inner life. The non-conformity of the Jehovah's Witnesses - or, better, this form of adoration - appealed to me from the beginning. Considering also that it is based just on Godspell, it's devoid of ideologies, philosophies, theologies and the harmful doctrines that almost every religion uses to make its disciples swallow. As Christ (the true leader of the Jehovah's movement) said in a famous sentence "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" [John 8.32]. Thanks to the Bible, I have refused many false traditions. Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays or any other holidays (save one: the Memorial of Christ's Death during Passover). They believe these celebrations grew out of ancient false religions. I relieved my past blames committed by ignorance, as I didn't know the truth - and now I feel like a dove flying toward freedom, the real freedom which is the faculty of exercise my free will." The work of Maurizio Bianchi - in its early, completely occluded years - is emotional (despite outwardly cold conceits), depressing (because of the obvious) and completely worth seeking out. "Symphony for a Genocide" has recently been reissued by Hospital Productions and W.M.O./r.