The Rome tape label of harsh nylon noise: power electronics and wall noise crossed with noir jazz, built around Adriano Vincenti's projects and open to the international wall-noise network.
Signora Ward Records is an Italian tape label based in Rome, and the Bureau files it as one of the outlets through which the contemporary power-electronics and wall-noise network documents itself. It describes its own field, only half in jest, as harsh nylon noise wall: power electronics and harsh noise crossed with a noir-jazz strain and a fetish-and-giallo visual language. The result is transgressive and stylised, more cinematic than political, and quite distinct from the grey confrontation of much of the form.
The label is built around the projects of Adriano Vincenti. His Cronaca Nera and Macelleria Mobile di Mezzanotte dominate the WARD catalogue, which now runs past a hundred entries, and Signora Ward functions first as the home and outlet for that world of work. Around it has gathered a steady run of like-minded Italian and international material, issued mostly on cassette in small, themed editions.
For this archive the label matters most through its international ties. The WARD catalogue has carried Vomir's Black Bag and Richard Ramirez's work, and its WARD018 is Homo Sense, a cassette by Black Leather Jesus and the Italian power-noise project Le Cose Bianche, the work of Giovanni Mori. That release is why the label appears here: it ties the American queer-noise line to the Italian fetish-noise one, and it sits beside a Nylon HNW compilation that gathers the wall-noise end of the same network.
A second thread runs back to the first wave of Italian noise. The label has issued work by Maurizio Bianchi, including a collaboration with Vincenti, which links its contemporary roster to one of the founders of the European tradition. The catalogue circulates through the Italian extreme-music network, including Old Europa Cafe, in the small-edition cassette economy rather than wide release.
The Bureau files Signora Ward Records as a small but well-connected Italian label: a tape imprint with a strong house aesthetic, the home of Adriano Vincenti's projects, and a node that links the Italian, French and American ends of the contemporary noise and wall network.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene