Alessandra Celletti
Overground

Alessandra's idea of reviewing her own work is amusing, but StefanoHab is right. Although everyone in a conflict of interest insists that it is not true, even in this case, the roles must be distinct. Don't worry! I'm here, a flesh-and-blood reviewer, with a license to kill. Shall I go? Then I will go and plunge in.

Africa doesn't easily shake off its stereotypes. It seemed that the old clichés about corrupt dictators and political chaos belonged to the past when, some time ago, Americans and French had to intervene to save their compatriots from yet another outbreak of violence. Nothing new, then. Except... except that African songs and rhythms now promise to add to the record harvests of recent years to lift the continent's fortunes. The miracle will occur thanks to the dividends from this work by Alessandra Celletti, destined for both critical and public success at an international level. It matters little that Alessandra is still looking for a CD distributor: according to Tito Livio, even Rome began with four houses. And Africa will not be the only one to benefit from the sales of this cd: half the world, in one guise or another, is present here, lending its colors to this first large fresco by a classical pianist who, having set aside scores, has decided to devote herself for a while to electronic music. With the same sensitivity, the same vivacity, the same freshness that has made her interpretations of Janacek and Debussy memorable.

“Overground”, inspired by the nuclear tests in Mururoa, invites reflection on the destructive use of science and the contemptuous and offensive treatment that the environment suffers at the hands of man. There are tropical paradises that we allow to turn into nuclear dumps: this is the meaning of including a poem by Gregory Corso on the bomb, a warning that stands to this CD's music as the purchasing advice to the program they sponsor: brief, but indispensable. Rather than with a symphonic poem, Alessandra ignites the imagination with short, colorful vignettes, sound snapshots that last just long enough to convey the idea: a paradise on earth, the simple life of the natives, the desolation of senseless destruction. And, by way of preface, a clever interpretation of another poem about the bomb, this time by Allen Ginsberg. As in a game of cards, the images chase each other, overlapping, iconic representations of values, landscapes, actions, and feelings. A soprano's voice adds unexpected dignity to a composite work that what makes it stimulating is precisely the refusal to conform to already codified contiguous aesthetics - musique concrète, exotica, trance, prog rock, experimentation, thematic music, electronic, ambient, easy listening. This surprise by Alessandra was revealed in preview at a brewery in Palestrina housed in the underpass of the Temple of Fortune Primigenia. That concert, fragmentary but ambitious (comment of a local between a wiener and a mug: “Better rock than these mental jerks”), crystallizes here without smudges, precise, immediate, inventive. Precise, never pedantic. Immediate, no baroque flourishes. Inventive, never predictable. And linear, yet unpredictable: a music that enjoys the freedom to go where it pleases, neither challenging unknown territories nor falling prey to stereotyped trends or fads.

This CD is a declaration of independence and a promise for the future. Independence? Future? Ethnic samples? But weren't we saying that nothing new was coming from Africa? New, in Alessandra, is the handling of the samples - used as words in the musical discourse rather than, as is common today, as repetitive punctuation or droning base. But Alessandra doesn't even realize it: of trance, she barely knows a track by Deep Forest chosen as a television show theme; she doesn't even know what easy listening and exotica are. In fact - although “Overground” has a singular identity in the electronic music scene, it is notable how Alessandra, though through her own restless personality, has captured the zeitgeist. The coordinates of the spirit of the times - precisely now - are:

1) rock is dead, so much so that it appears in our life either as a global theatrical phenomenon (fronted by U2, the Rolling Stones, and others, numerous fundamentalists who still recognize a mission in it or see a rebellion against authority) or as reassuring nostalgia, a safe haven in the storm (Oasis, Arctic Monkeys, The Strokes);

2) the global village project is in a very advanced stage of realization, with ethnic contaminations present in the music of all genres,

3) the future lies in pop - in a genre, that is, which seduces rather than conquers, which leverages melody and private feelings rather than message and public protest.

Inadvertently, Alessandra Celletti has discovered a new possibility: music informed by all this, but with a classical heart. In a nutshell, “Overground” already provides the guidelines: - emphasis on timbres rather than architecture, thus starting a phase opposite to that of recent contemporary cultured music, dominated by minimalism with too-defined geometries, - elimination of repetitiveness to give space to inventiveness, the moment, the personal, the unique, music in which every sound phenomenon stands on its own, not as part of a series or sequence, - a healthy collaboration between classical and electronic instruments, able to bring classical music down from its empyrean ghetto and able to canonize computers and samples as instruments of poetry, promoting them from the current limbo of dance or rave machines. Instruments of poetry, I said. Tools for conscious and accomplished expression rather than machine guns capable of piercing every beat with the same sonorous bullet to the point of nausea, - valuing the classical preparation which, making it possible to respect the small rules, allows breaking the big ones, foremost the verse-chorus-verse scheme. “Overground” flows lightly, and “In The Wind” approaches the successful single. It will never happen? Stranger things have been seen... Laurie Anderson's “O Superman” is a fitting precedent, - appropriation and assimilation of different languages and, why not, even the fashionable slang for a musical Esperanto that can be understood by the most people and that can be characterized by the historical moment that produced it.

This universality is precisely denied by the inclusion of the two poems about the bomb, read in English. On the other hand, these texts highlight the temporal parameters of Alessandra's operation, evoking the beat revolution and the importance that youth has acquired since then in the social sphere, always heralding ferment and transformation, collective consciousness, and an implacable judge of sometimes absurd decisions - the nuclear tests in Mururoa being one of them - that the adult world arrives at. Alessandra had been thinking about a comment on the facts of Mururoa for some time - and the decision to approach electronic music matured from the perceived impossibility of using only a piano to achieve it. It's not a matter of ambition: Alessandra did not set herself a long-term goal. Nor is it a matter of saturation with classical music, since her subsequent CD was an interpretation of Philip Glass's “Metamorphoses.” It's that the creativity of this time, which wants to articulate the feelings of this time, can only do it with the instruments of this time - first of all the computer. Which, contrary to what one might think, emphasizes the musicality of the artist's intention, allowing them to shape and detail the sound mix as never before, as it enables them to be both conductor and single performer. And the result is an airy work, of immediate reading but that repeated listenings do not deprive of a direct and genuine charm, familiar and yet exotic. Indeed: by accustoming the ear to its gently idiosyncratic logic, one appreciates its journey more fully. Just as the facade of Andrea Palladio reveals the internal plan of a church, so “Overground” frankly represents twenty years of synthetic music. We side with Pink Floyd's psychedelias. We dive into the electronic deserts mapped out in the late '70s by Vangelis in now extinct albums (“See you later,” to name one), solitudes now radicalized by Geir Janssen and William Basinski. The prominence of the percussion cites the many minor artists, published by labels such as Lumina, Private, and Hearts of Space, which have given life to the body of synthetic production and have always treated ethnic elements with commendable interest and respect.

The balance of blends does not reveal that “Overground” is the Celletti's first electronic experience, but it immediately places them on the electronic scene in a promising position. The orchestration, neither ascetic nor redundant, is designed so that each voice helps to carry the melody forward - a melody that sounds clear in the listener's ear even if occasionally no instrument is playing one. “Overground” is a story with text and musical accompaniment, a bit like those that Windham Hill has published for children, and its presentation at the headquarters of the esoteric music magazine "Deep Listenings," on a bright October afternoon, convinced many of the validity of the proposal and the honesty of this project with exemplary transparency, beyond protagonism and fashion. For just a year and a half of work, “Overground” represents a flattering harvest, and constitutes proof that to find unpublished music, there is no need to become superheroes: just put on the shoulders an adequate musical preparation and know how to listen to the voice of the new. A personal path will unravel among the milestones of the known and will go a little further. The new African leaders are doing the same thing at home: avoiding the stereotypes that still condemn the continent to a state of servility and dependence and finding new definitions, new resources, new possibilities. To launch on the international level. The premises are there. Everyone forges their own future. Alessandra knows this.