Maurizio Bianchi

Maurizio Bianchi (born 4 December 1955 in Pomponesco in the Province of Mantua) is an Italian pioneer of industrial music, originating from Milan. Bianchi was inspired by the music of Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler and Throbbing Gristle. He wrote about music for Italian magazines before beginning to release his own cassettes under the name of Sacher-Pelz in August 1979. He released four cassettes as Sacher-Pelz before switching to his own name or simply "MB" in 1980.

Bianchi corresponded with many of the key players in the industrial music and noise music scenes including Merzbow, GX Jupitter-Larsen, SPK, Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions and William Bennett of Whitehouse. After this exchange of letters and music, his first LPs were released in 1981. 'Symphony For A Genocide' was released on Nigel Ayers' Sterile Records label after Bianchi had sent Ayers the money to press it. Each track on the LP was named after a Nazi extermination camp. The cover featured photographs of the Auschwitz Orchestra, a group of concentration camp prisoners who were forced to play classical music as people were herded into the gas chambers. The back cover included the text "The moral of this work: the past punishment is the inevitable blindness of the present".

Also in 1981, William Bennett, head of the band Whitehouse and the British Come Org. label, offered Bianchi a record contract, which Bianchi signed unchecked. It was based on a "joke contract" that Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound had sketched. The contract assumed all rights to Bianchi's work. After delivery of the tapes Bennett edited-in speeches by Nazi leaders, and instead of the relatively unsensational name MB, it was published under the alias Leibstandarte SS MB, named after the SS unit that worked as bodyguards to Adolf Hitler.

By 1983 and the release of the 'Plain Truth' LP on U.K. power electronics label Broken Flag, Bianchi had become a Jehovah's Witness. At the end of 1983 Bianchi announced his withdrawal from music, stating "The end is very near, and we have a very short time to recognise our mistakes and to redeem ourselves... I stopped doing music, and now my life is going towards its full awareness".

In 1998, encouraged by Alga Marghen label head Emanuele Carcano, who offered him a label of his own, Maurizio Bianchi resumed making music. The label was EEs'T Records, through which he released new editions of old MB albums and many new recordings. Bianchi then proceeded to work on over a hundred new projects both solo or in collaboration with other Italian and international artists including Atrax Morgue, Aube, Francisco Lopez, Mauthausen Orchestra, Merzbow, Ryan Martin and Philip Julian / Cheapmachines. Bianchi has worked with record labels including Dais Records, the Carrboro, North Carolina based Hot Releases and the Italian Menstrual Recordings to re-release some of his out of print material. On August 19, 2009, for unspecified personal reasons, Maurizio Bianchi decided again to completely stop making music. This decision was soon after reversed; Maurizio Bianchi continued to release new music. [SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]