Nervous Gender Reloaded & Bernardino Constantino
Some collaborations travel by plane. This one traveled by the older routes — signal to signal, time zone to time zone, Los Angeles dissolving into Venice dissolving into whatever hour it was when the message finally arrived.
Bernardino Costantino, operating out of Venice under the sign of carbon and voltage, encountered Kyrie/Mantra and recognized something in it — or it recognized something in him. The track pulls from two of the medieval West’s most persistent vocal forms: the Dies Irae, that medieval sequence cataloguing the terror of final judgment, and the Kyrie, the plea that has been cycling through human throats for over a thousand years. Lord, have mercy. Nervous Gender Reloaded had run these chants through their own machinery; Costantino took the result and ran it through his.
His visual practice — documented across years at Prossimo a Disintegrazione (“On the Verge of Disintegration”) — has always lived in territory he himself describes as visionary, obsessive, grotesque, metaphysical. The collaboration asked for nothing different. The band extended complete creative autonomy: take it where you want to take it. Feedback was offered, conversation continued across the lag of continents, but the destination was Bernardino’s to choose.
What came back was a video that understood the song from the inside — that the Kyrie is not comfort, it is acknowledgment. That mercy begins with the admission that something vast and indifferent has been watching. The disintegration was always already in progress.
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http://disintegrazioneof.blogspot.com/