"Laxative Souls, also known by the contraction 'LXSS', was one of the very first post-industrial music projects on the Italian scene. Born in the early 1980s in the province of Ascoli Piceno, according to many critics LXSS was chronologically second only to 'MB'. The project was from the mind of Roberto Marinelli and takes it's name from Dante's Inferno's dialog of souls in purgatory, a literal translation of which s not reflected in the English language, thus generating a nonsensical phrase. His music is a mixture of electronic rage, vocal distortions, concrete music, feedback generated by self-assembly of electrical circuits and cut-ups of documentaries, recordings and radio proclamations. Less dehumanizing than Maurizio Bianchi, the compositions of LXSS seem more linked to an emotional interpretation of the social organism, where in the evolution of the songs and albums it seems to elaborate an almost narrative development of the sound material.
The first album under the name LXSS was released after two years of exhausting research and construction of samples, for the 'Multiple Configuration' label of Roberto Marinelli himself, for which 'TAC', 'Tasaday', 'Maze 1066' and 'Luca Miti' also recorded. In 'Twist And Decease' Marinelli traces a series of violent deaths that have crossed the historical, political and social universe, using an almost documentary style. From Umberto The First killed by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci to Aldo Moro killed by the Red Brigades, from the aerospace accident of Vladimir Michajlovič Komarov to the mass exterminations of concentration camps, the narratives sometimes develop following documentary evidence and elaborating compositions around recordings, interviews and voice documents concerning the events themselves, and at other times in an emotional way through a succession of sound images and 'suggestions'. In his narrative evolutions then, Marinelli never seems to give value to the catastrophic spectacularization of crime news ,trying instead to maintain the maximum critical lucidity in the poetic treatment of events.
In 1984 Marinelli published the album entitled 'Desinfektionsraum', a cassette focused on the final solution of the Jewish question and more particularly on the extermination camp of Auschwitz, in which, according to Ambrosini, the fusion between poetic-sound processing of images and documentary narration reaches its compositional apex, also managing to trace a link between those misdeeds and the inability of our society to analyze any event in a non-rhetorical way."
