EXCEPTIONAL FEATURE + REVIEW OF “SECOND SIGHT” (CLOCK DVA CD + PAOLO BERTONI’S BOOK) BY ALDO CHIMENTI (ROCKERILLA, OCTOBER ISSUE)
Clock DVA: the Seer and the Clock by Aldo Chimenti (Rockerilla, October 2025)
“Every move on Adi Newton‘s field has its own ethico-aesthetic reason for being, projected forward, a calling to explore enduring paradigms and future languages. The latest act under the Clock DVA name is a sort of ‘lost album’, created with the intent to fill a chronological/creative void in the third artistic phase begun in the 2010s, a period that marked the project’s rebirth after a long period of latency and the arrival of the polyhedric Maurizio TeZ Martinucci.
In the pages of Adi Newton: Second Sight, the English-language edition of Clock DVA/TAGC – Sogni sepolti (2022), acclaimed music critic Paolo Bertoni provides a meticulous analysis of Adi Newton’s works, including collateral endeavors like The Anti Group/ TAGC, Psychophysicist, etc., and a brief chapter on the legendary, meteor-like band The Future, the nucleus from whose cells Clock DVA and The Human League were born. They were pioneers of the Sheffield electronic scene which, besides our subjects, included seminal, indispensable entities like Cabaret Voltaire and Vice Versa. A philological vade mecum on the musical activities and respective phases of a revolutionary force called Clock DVA, in homage to that “A Clockwork Orange” of Kubrickian memory… A man of knowledge and thought, the charismatic Adi has rightfully distinguished himself on the frontlines of a wide-spectrum avant-garde research, where the poly-dimensional character of the Newtonian genius feeds on cultivated content, among literary and cinematic references, esoteric registers and futuristic glimpses, science and science fiction, philosophy and cosmology, technology and psychoacoustics…
Throughout their career, Clock DVA have developed a virtuous theorem of music and visual arts increasingly marked by a flawless, millimetric perfectionism, compositional strategies that incite one to elevate the threshold of synesthetic-sensory perception. Bertoni’s agile volume constitutes an excellent guide for navigating the complex itineraries of this extraordinary musical galaxy. To crown it, the valuable interviews given by Adi and TeZ.
Tasked with “capturing the sonic essence of the third phase,” the musical section of Second Sight features 11 titles in total, among rarities, unreleased tracks, and alternative versions consistent with the compendium’s spirit—a necessary act that our indomitable researchers of parallel worlds place in a pre-Noesis spatiotemporal segment, the 2023 masterpiece.
Studded with transfigured vocal themes, the mathematical, yet epic-solemn script of Endless opens the dance of a cinematic party in the cosmos’s higher spheres. Glimpses of electrodynamic irradiations that inoculate charges of physical-cerebral energy into the algebraic codes of The Konstructor, Re_Rayonist, Kabaret 13_Zvukopis_RMX and Re_Arketechton, where pulsating lines of computerized figures and spurts of metronomic beats unleash incomparable harmonic-vibrational events, further fueled by ellipses of mercurial frequencies and melodic passages to be read between the lines.
In the prismatic Neoteric, Adi’s cavernous voice returns to dispense narrative enigmas that provide a lyrical counterpoint to the surgical pulses of the rhythmic weave and the glacial, orbiting waves floating in the background. If the immersive Sentinel and Immission set in motion flows of alien drones and holograms of refracted, forthcoming crystals, the hypnotic Re_Amna teems with gravitational sequences made of astral stones and atoms of crystal, while the ‘noetic’ The Simulacra and Drive The Exotic Non-Essentials (exclusive titles from the Noesis CD) agitate neuronal cells that trigger rushes of adrenaline and shudders of dark, oneiric pleasure. Immense.“
