Arti e Mestieri
Tilt

An onomatopoeic sound associated with a halt, an out-of-service, a breakdown. Today it might be more caustically qualified with a nice crash, out of service in an era of easy Anglicisms.

"Tilt" finds itself nicely reprinted on the shelves as if it were a banal recovery of the "let's dig them out again" series, but fortunately, you find a nice caption on the Feltrinelli shelf that clarifies the value of the product. "Arti e Mestieri" means little to many, but to others and particularly to lovers of mid-'70s Italian progressive jazz, they are more than a Felliniesque nostalgia; they represent a moment of high cultural antagonistic expression. There is a strong difference, however, between them and Demetrio's lamented "Area" or even "Banco del Mutuo Soccorso." In "Tilt," only the music ever prevails, the Zappa-esque instrumental suites with vibraphone inserts, the "struggle" is sustained on the music sheet, never on words and proclamations. You won't find anything that recalls Banco's liberating "Non mi rompete", where Francesco Di Giacomo asked to let silence fall because "I sleep this dream", or Area's "Mela di Odessa" where the right to freedom of will and judgment was invoked to gaze beyond, or even in "Gioia e Rivoluzione" where the confrontation is military in the sense that "my machine gun is the double bass."

The charm is always the same: black and white images ("Positivo e Negativo"), long hair and big mustaches with a clenched fist. At times, it seemed to me even anticipatory of certain '90s movements: the post-rock of Tortoise in particular, but still above all remains the most symphonic Zappa, yet at the same time King Crimson. Take this album and listen to it sequentially without breaks. It's conceptual in the sense that everything is in its place, played divinely with a never-beaten drum always worked on the snare (Furio Chirico was the first Italian drummer to participate in the Modern Drummer Festival), with great skill in dosing all the ingredients. It is not guitar-centric, it is not solo-centric, it is simply a great intellectual progressive album that wants to express its working-class soul, that of Turin committed to facing the class struggle, where the expression of art has already become a profession.

It's an anarchic album, in the sense that it has no expressive limits but at the same time does not indulge in gratuitous digressions, where the stylistic "Articolazioni" (the longest track of the album) converge.

An album that rightfully enters the history of Italian music.