Sense Fracture - Landscape Of Thorns (2023)

Although active since before the inception of Haunter Records, Sense Fracture’ release schedule has been somewhat sparse and infrequent. Throughout the years, the soul behind the project — label co-head Francesco Birsa Alessandri— focused more on keeping the Milan underground scene alive by working extensively as a promoter and a DJ.


Their debut LP Landscape Of Thorns sets to repair this imbalance, with its 11 tracks showing the scope of Alessandri’s research into chaos, intensity and meta-fictional abstraction. Dissecting various genres of music known for their spiritual and sonic ferociousness, the Sense Fracture method is to then rebuild them with the tools of hi-tech sound design and harsh noise, birthing cheeky monsters and uncanny animals.

A kind of loose concept album, Landscape Of Thorns was inspired by many real-world tragedies and their political and human ramifications, aiming to comment and react by producing a disjointed yet hyperrealist narrative dealing with borders and the violence of division, the fear of the unknown and the possibility of survival through mutation. An uneven undercurrent of mediterranean music –specifically south-Italian folk dances- traverses and germinates through every track, rendering itself more or less evident in various amounts. This was spawned by Alessandri’s need to incorporate more of their cultural heritage in their music, using Italy’s problematic history of internal and external relations as the main catalyst for all of the album’s preoccupations.

Rhythmic structures ranging from traditional saltarello, pizzica and tarantella to postmodern compounds like lento violento are thus contaminated and transformed into digitized grindcore exorcisms, de-humanized soundscapes and maximalist rave barrages. Unsurprisingly, the lineup of collaborators that pop throughout the album is composed of artists who share Sense Fracture’s taste for boundary-pushing: from the mighty Kenyan digi-core commando DUMA, to noise-poetry hellion Elvin Brandhi, Italian avant-metal and performance art legend ?Alos and post-hardcore destroyer Lizzitsky.

Landscape Of Thorns is, at its core, a tale of the ultimate border, of all efforts made to surpass it, destroy it and subvert it. Of the struggle to repurpose its divisive violence into connective tissue. A surreal melodrama revealing itself as a political magic operation.