ANTONI MAIOVVIThe Thorns of Love
Caravan 2LP (CVAN012)
A. This Is The Beast
B. The Sigh From The Sky Was A Lie Without Doubt
C. Class Dagger
D. Horsehead Blue
Antoni Maiovvi's "The Thorns Of Love" is a Liebes-Arie to a broken heart. An embrace of Italian drama and euphoric fear. His music exists somewhere between Patrick Cowley's Hi-NRG epics, Arthur Russell's melancholic beauty and John Carpenter's traumatizing soundtracks. Antoni Maiovvi is the name by which Anton Maiof unleashes his bastard offspring of disco and psychotronic horror and here with "The Thorns of Love" he has produced a deeply personal symphony to a lover lost and the sanctifying power of the dancefloor. Following the release of the highly acclaimed eponymously titled album from emptyset, Caravan Recordings steps into the ravine of heartache to shine a light on Bristol's underground disco hero Antoni Maiovvi.
Antoni Maiovvi is a nefarious creature of the night, a figure of twilight opulence and the love child of Evelyn Thomas and Lucio Fulci conceived in the lurid backrooms of the Boccaccio Club. The sweatbox is in his DNA, throbbing analogue circuitry courses through his flesh like rivers of blood and where his heart once lived there is now only yearning for the alchemical marriage of sex, death and technology. From Naples to Frankfurt he has stalked the dancefloors of Europe planning this moment and at last in this compendium of unbridled fist-clenchers his time has come. Now he will stop at nothing to bring his arpeggiated talisman down onto the souls of men, squeezing out that last breath of humanity in a pulsing Dantean dance-macabre.
"The Thorns of Love" (Antoni's 3rd album) takes a unique muscular and cerebral approach to electronic dance music bringing together the Italo love explosion, spine-tingling Euro-horror and the melancholic proto-techno musings of early Model 500 and ShareVari. Maiovvi takes the helm of this noir-tinged Trojan horse carving out a dancefloor machine with commanding synth-work, operatic drums and mind-bending atmospherics. As the album climaxes and the smoke pours across a crowded room he steps out from the shadows and delivers his final eulogy to 20th Century hedonism, preaching with the unhinged vocals of a coked up Bryan Ferry. Love may be the drug but for Maiovvi death can be the only future.
