Assemblea Musicale Teatrale
Il Sogno di Alice

The "Assemblea Musicale Teatrale" is a Genoese collective born in the mid-seventies from the ashes of the prog band "La Famiglia Degli Ortega" and the meeting with the Piedmontese singer-songwriter Giampiero Alloisio.

The main occupation of the group in those fiery Years of Lead is to propose musical protest shows with a clearly leftist orientation. Nevertheless, the Assemblea manages to maintain a strong and stubborn freedom of thought that allows them to show no mercy even for the "faction" to which they belong, placing them halfway between the Teatro Canzone they saw in Jannacci and Gaber (with whom Alloisio would collaborate for a long time) the two most skilled/irreverent/jester-like standard-bearers and the more singer-songwriter and committed music of people like Lolli and Guccini.

It is precisely the latter who notices the band and takes on the task of producing their second album "Marilyn" from '78 and indeed "Il Sogno di Alice" from the following year.

The LP sees a strong collaboration between the Bolognese songwriter and the Ligurian group. The synergies produced see the birth of songs that would go on to enrich Guccini's already full basket. "Lager" from the first and "Venezia" by Alloisio are the two most famous tracks on the record but which sees in lesser-known pieces an unexpected strength that, listened to years later, sound worthy of brief reflection.

"Ma Che Cazzo Vuoi" is a very simple ballad where a wife/partner (it could also be a parent) disowns with disdain the family member too involved in drugs and whistling holes shut in the toilet, showing a great emotional sensitivity of the author and a keen attention to a current issue often kept quiet and never sufficiently analyzed.

This sensitivity is also expressed in "I Fiascheggiatori", a psychological and moral analysis of the drunks who frequented the port of Genoa depicted in their daily apathy made of glasses and annihilation of the soul: "Incurably sick with dreams, forced to think of the Scarlet Pimpernel's face because there is nothing to do, invariably determined to do nothing anymore. One should hope, shoot, disappear, hide among the people. One should try something, something that remains above the dated monsters of ink, of the glue of old posters like the October dates that keep losing more sense: let's take back the sea, let's go fishing for it ourselves, incredible and immense. And in this damn sea, there's not a fish that can swim.", simply wonderful!

In "La Fattoria Degli Animali" the group launches an analysis of Orwell's novel by presenting passages and strong critiques towards power ("under the temporary guidance of a government of pigs they all worked towards accumulation. It may seem strange but it is almost scientifically proven that the pig is made for leadership...pearl!!!) and the more fundamentalist left ("....but the hen is certainly a Trotskyist or pre-capitalist spy if it fails to grasp the historical sense of giving to our State as aid its beaten sons").

In "Il Sogno Di Alice" their burlesque but committed spirit blossoms into an explosion of grotesque scenes linked to the tale of Alice, precisely, and the socio-political scene of the time ( ...“Ahi ahi, Alice this mixture I don't like. Ahi ahi, Alice I'm having a terrible doubt: Are we the children of the Resistance or the grandchildren of the she-wolf, we're all in fact Togliatti's adoptive ones.”)

Overall, musically, the album is not very homogeneous, swinging between ballads and irreverent musical cabarets, showing the limits of the pieces outside the play that should have hosted them, but it blatantly leaves the sensation of having left us lucid and impertinent words, written with great attention to substance without worrying about having to please someone or something; it is in the poetry contained therein that we perceive the weight of rational and extraordinarily alive souls, it is in examining their contemporaneity that Alloisio and associates show a vision of the surrounding world devoid of preconceptions, allowing free thought to express its disapproval or approval.

Intellectually Anarchic!?!