Maurizio Bianchi (b. 4 December 1955, Pomponesco, Province of Mantua; working from Milan) is the Italian pioneer of noise and industrial music and the central figure of the Italian post-industrial tradition. The catalogue runs across two periods: the early years (1979–1984), comprising four Sacher-Pelz cassettes and ten LPs released under his own name or as M.B., across which his method was established; and the post-1998 period, beginning with the metaphysical trilogy Colori-First Day Last Day-Dates and continuing through the present, in which a calmer, more reflective mode extends that early vocabulary. A 14-year religious hiatus separates the two periods. The Bureau's editorial reading positions Maurizio Bianchi at Tier I as the Continental counterpart to the post-1976 UK industrial first wave and the foundational genealogical anchor for the Italian post-industrial tradition.
The pre-history runs through Bianchi's late-1970s position as reviewer for Italian music magazines, during which he encountered the foundational influences he has consistently cited: Tangerine Dream and Conrad Schnitzler (the Berlin-school electronic tradition) and Throbbing Gristle (the post-1976 UK first wave). The first cassette releases under the Sacher-Pelz pseudonym appeared in August 1979. The pseudonym is taken from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's 1870 fiction Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs); Bianchi's own later gloss situates the choice as "celebrating the masochistic apotheosis of the modern victims". Four cassettes appeared under the Sacher-Pelz banner: Cainus, Venus, Cease To Exist and Velours, all all-instrumental electronic collages built through Bianchi's working programme of taking pre-recorded tracks and "modifying, maltreating them until they became an unrecognizable mash".
The switch to his own name (Maurizio Bianchi, or simply M.B.) followed in 1980, with the cassette Mectpyo/Blut the first document under the new authorship; Bianchi's account of the name change is that "there was a dramatic evolution in my musical approach and to disseminate my own personality". The 1980–1981 period saw a sustained correspondence-and-cassette-exchange network with the key post-1976 industrial and noise figures internationally: Merzbow (Akita Masami), GX Jupitter-Larsen of The Haters, SPK, Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions, and William Bennett of Whitehouse. The Bureau holds the correspondence network as Bianchi's pre-recording network: the first LPs in 1981 emerge directly from these letter-and-tape exchanges.
The 1981 release of Symphony for a Genocide on Nigel Ayers' Sterile Records (with Bianchi having sent Ayers the money to press it) constitutes the anchor document of those years. Each track is named after a Nazi extermination camp; the cover features photographs of the Auschwitz Orchestra, the group of concentration-camp prisoners forced to play classical music as inmates were herded into the gas chambers; the back-cover text reads "The moral of this work: the past punishment is the inevitable blindness of the present". The work is unambiguously memorial-and-anti-fascist in editorial position. The Bureau notes this with care because the contemporaneous Come Organisation affair (described below) materially complicates the album's reception history.
Also in 1981, William Bennett, head of Whitehouse and the British Come Organisation label, offered Bianchi a record contract. Bianchi signed it unchecked. The contract had been sketched by Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound as a parody "joke contract" assuming all rights to the signatory's work; Bianchi's later account is that he signed without reading. Bennett edited Nazi-leader speeches into the delivered material and released the results under the alias Leibstandarte SS MB (the SS unit serving as Hitler's bodyguards): Triumph of the Will (1981) and Weltanschauung (1982). Bianchi has consistently disowned both releases and excludes them from his own discography; the 2013 Teban Slide Art reissue box restored authentic credit under "M.B." The Come Org. affair is one of the post-1976 tradition's most significant editorial violations: the originator's memorial-and-anti-fascist vein was overlaid with adjacent fascist-iconographic content without permission, and the resulting releases circulated for several decades under an alias the originator did not authorise. The Bureau's editorial position: the Leibstandarte SS MB releases sit in the Whitehouse / Come Organisation catalogue rather than in the Bianchi catalogue, and the 2013 reissue corrections are the corrected record.
The 1981–1984 LP catalogue is exceptionally dense. Ten LPs appear across four years, the majority on Bianchi's own Mectpyo Sounds imprint: Symphony for a Genocide (1981, Sterile), Menses (1982, Mectpyo Sounds), Neuro Habitat / Mörder Unter Uns (1982, Mectpyo), Regel (1982, Mectpyo), Mectpyo Bakterium (1982, DYS), Das Testament (1983, announced as "his last record"), Endometrio (1983, the second artistic peak and the manifesto of his "bionic aesthetics"), Carcinosi (1983), [Aktivitat] (1983, Tegal), The Plain Truth (1983, Broken Flag · in an exceptional German-electronic-music vein), and the film soundtrack Armaghedon (1984, Mectpyo Sounds · most copies destroyed by M.B. after release; the most obscure and elusive document). The Broken Flag partnership with Gary Mundy (Ramleh) opened the UK power-electronics distribution route. Numerous tapes (Mörder Tape, Fetish Tape, Atomique, Cold, Voyeur, Industrial, Telmegiddo) sit alongside the LP catalogue. The Bureau notes the catalogue's consistency: Bianchi establishes the method on Symphony for a Genocide and extends it across the later nine LPs without significant methodological departure (the German-electronic-music turn on The Plain Truth being the exception).
In 1984 Bianchi converted to Jehovah's Witnesses and withdrew from music. The hiatus extended about 14 years. Bianchi's own account of the conversion: "it is just the pure expression of my hidden, deep inner life; the non-conformity of the Jehovah's Witnesses appealed to me from the beginning". The withdrawal was complete: no new releases appeared 1985–1997 and Bianchi has consistently declined to engage with the period's music-press apparatus. The Bureau records this without commentary on the religious decision itself; the hiatus is a documentary fact of the catalogue's shape rather than an editorial position.
The return in 1997–1998 was occasioned by Emanuele Carcano of the Italian experimental imprint Alga Marghen, who offered Bianchi a label of his own. EEs'T Records became the vehicle for both reissues of the 1981–1984 catalogue and new recordings. The metaphysical trilogy Colori (1998), First Day Last Day (1999) and Dates (2001) marks the post-hiatus statement, with religious and philosophical themes dominating and the sound idiom shifting toward a much calmer, near-ambient method. Frammenti (2002) and Antarctic Mosaic (2003) extend the post-1998 manner. The Bureau notes the post-1998 catalogue has been characterised in some quarters as "new age" - Bianchi himself has explicitly rejected the framing - and reads the palette instead as a calmer-but-continuous extension of the early working programme, with the same de-composition method applied to less aggressive source material.
On 19 August 2009 Bianchi announced a complete cessation of music-making for unspecified personal reasons; the decision was soon reversed and later activity has continued through the 2010s and 2020s without significant interruption. The recent catalogue is dense with reissues (the Mectpyo Box 10-CD set 2008, expanded 2015; the Vinyl-On-Demand five-LP archival box; numerous label-specific re-pressings) and with collaborations: Aube (the Aube Reworks Maurizio Bianchi pair; Nakajima d. 24 September 2013), Merzbow (the Amalgamelody CD 2015, Old Europa Cafe), Saverio Evangelista of Esplendor Geométrico, Magnetica Ars Lab / Arnaldo Pontis, Abul Mogard, and the Sutcliffe No More / Paul Taylor partnership. The recent imprints span the Italian, American, German and Japanese imprints: EEs'T, Dais Records, Hot Releases (Carrboro NC), Menstrual Recordings, Hospital Productions (the 2007 Symphony for a Genocide reissue), Vinyl-On-Demand and Old Europa Cafe.
The Bureau's editorial position: Maurizio Bianchi is filed at Tier I as the central figure of the Italian post-industrial tradition and the Continental counterpart to the UK first wave. The 1981–1984 ten-LP catalogue establishes the foundational method; the 14-year religious hiatus constitutes a documentary fact of the catalogue's shape; the post-1998 continuation extends the working programme across nearly three further decades with sustained productivity. The Leibstandarte SS MB Come Org. affair sits in the Whitehouse / Come Organisation catalogue rather than in the M.B. catalogue, with Bianchi's consistent disavowal preserved as the anchor record. The influence on the later Italian death-industrial tradition (Atrax Morgue / Corbelli d. 2007; Murder Corporation; Wertham), the international harsh-noise tradition (The Haters, Controlled Death, the Hospital Productions axis), and the continuing Italian post-industrial catalogue (Sigillum S, Sshe Retina Stimulants, Iugula-Thor) routes through the early catalogue's "low-key depression" mode and through the precedent of the Mectpyo Sounds artist-label model. The Bureau holds Bianchi as one of the foundational figures of the form this archive mainly documents.