“Temponauta” from South Central Positronics is a varied collection of (mostly) instrumental pieces very loosely inspired by the Italian New Age community, the Damanhur Federation, which is located in the Alpine foothills near Turin.
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In the late 1990s they revealed to the world that they had mastered the theory and practice of time travel (among other esoteric pursuits, some of which are connected to the lost civilisation Atlantis), which was covered in a 1998 issue of the “Fortean Times”, a UK publication that concerns itself with paranormal phenomena. “Temponauta” is an Italian word that roughly translates as “female time traveller” and each composition very obliquely suggests another phase, experience or aspect of her journey, but the listener is of course free to interpret the pieces in any way they wish.
From the creator of South Central Positronics “They did later row back on a lot of these assertions and re-positioned themselves as a more conventional spiritual commune and eco-village from the mid-2000s, but I never lost my fascination with their earlier claims of “esoteric physics” and “selfic science”.
Born of Italo-Celtic stock into a slowly rusting northern England in the throes of Thatcher-era de-industrialisation, the young Michele Sarto (“Mike” to those closest to him; other people just can’t pronounce the name properly) was bitten by the horror bug early. After having been “encouraged” to sit through an uncut version of Lucio Fulci’s surreal schlock masterpiece “City of the Living Dead” at the age of 6 by mischievous elder cousins, a lifelong fascination with the darker side of fiction was born. Equally haunted and excited by aftermath images of reanimated corpses, horrific “skull-crush” kills and a young woman literally vomiting out her innards, another element of that particular production was to make an indelible impression on the young Sarto; the maestro Fabio Frizzi’s masterful synthesizer-driven score.
