Bel Canto
White-Out Conditions

Disorientation, unease, and the feeling of navigating blindly, immersed in a dense fog; the English adjectives eerie and haunting, for which I can't find Italian equivalents as beautiful and phonetically effective, are most suitable to describe this album from 1987, the debut of Bel Canto; "White-Out Conditions" is disorienting, elusive, almost mocking. After a few listens, I thought I had formed a well-defined opinion—a very fascinating record with some sublime peaks but overall still unripe, especially if compared with the subsequent "Birds Of Passage" and "Shimmering, Warm And Bright," more elaborated, eclectic, and with a more "clear" vision, so to speak; I had interpreted its many instrumental passages as atmosphere sketches, ideas waiting for a more concrete development, but then I realized my mistake, of how "White-Out Conditions" had misled me and hidden its true dimension. To fully understand it, it took just one more listen, in the right circumstances: late at night, in absolute silence, in full communion with Artemis, "White-Out Conditions" gifted me deep sensations.

Bel Canto are Norwegian, not just any Norwegians but from Tromso, the northernmost city in the entire European continent, far away from all other major settlements in the nation, a final outpost squeezed between the Atlantic Ocean and a harsh, almost untouched nature, where even the balance between night and day is altered by the midnight sun and the auroras; unique atmospheres, hybridizations, a frontier and exploration culture that has left a profound mark on Bel Canto's music. Back then, Geir Jenssen was also part of the group, who later pursued an independent career as a full-fledged electronic musician, but fundamentally BC are Nils Johansen and Anneli Drecker, an eclectic multi-instrumentalist and visionary composer and a frontwoman whom calling extraordinary would be an understatement: in terms of vocal expressiveness, charisma, and chameleon-like versatility, she has nothing to envy to Joni Mitchell. I had known her as a refined and eclectic pop/jazzy/electronic interpreter, but in "White-Out Conditions" Anneli Drecker is something different. Majestic, hieratic, spiritual, her voice seems to echo from a dreamlike dimension that is nothing more than the observation of the surrounding reality through more attentive and perceptive eyes. It's no coincidence that the most emotionally devastating pairing on the album tells of atmospheres linked to the homeland of the three musicians: "White Out-Conditions", that fog that accompanies snowstorms, cloaking the landscape in a white and spectral shroud, nullifying the horizon and the colors; Nils Johansen's mandolin, an extremely prevalent and characterizing instrument throughout the album, draws an obsessive and circular pattern, Anneli wanders disoriented, in vain search of a light, but the arctic winter is stronger, canceling any possible hope. The macabre dance fades, slows down, morphs into a funeral procession with "Baltic Ice-Breaker", the tragedy of a ship trapped in the polar ice, the impending and inescapable fate awaiting its crew, resigned to a destiny stronger than any attempt at resistance, "A voice disappears with the wind, blows away along with the cracking of the ice, the track will be frozen over in a while, the scratching, the screaming, the whining, you're frozen to death, and soon there will be only the ice and the snow...".

Death is a very present element in "White-Out Conditions," not only in a physical sense but also emotionally, the darkest episode of the work is undoubtedly "Without You", devoid of the hieratic solemnity and figurative expressionism of "Baltic Ice-Breaker": the sound is more sparse and wave-like compared to the average of the album, a circular and pressing rhythm, slightly mitigated by a few sax interventions, and the bitter and disillusioned singing create an effect of apnea, an increasing oxygen debt, a sensation of irreparable emptiness and loss. But it's not all ice, disorientation, and fate; in "White-Out Conditions," there's also the seed of that vital and imaginative force that will blossom with the subsequent "Birds Of Passage," night atmospheres, not nightmares but yet unsettling dreams that however distance themselves quite clearly from the thicker darkness. Primarily the single "Blank Sheets", a folk ballad of disconcerting refinement halfway between gothic and medieval in which one can appreciate the seductive vocal shades of an Anneli Drecker more chanteuse and less shaman, and "Dreaming Girl", an upbeat rhythm tinged with Arabesque hues that hides a visionary ego tripping, "I am such a peculiar girl, have my dreams and thoughts in another world, but I live my life so lost in time, so lost in space, I belong to an unknown human race, perhaps I will come back again but I don't bother how or when".

"Blank Sheets"-"Dreaming Girl" and "White-Out Conditions"-"Baltic Ice-Breaker," the two focal points of the album, are separated by some atmospheric passages apparently disconnected from each other, like the operatic fantasia of "Capio", in which Anneli once again demonstrates her immense class, tackling ecstatic and theatrical tones, and the bizarre and unsettling "Agassiz", sustained by syncopated and urgent rhythms where the instruments (including voice) chase each other, creating a tribal dance with vaguely Dionysian suggestions, and in the end, it's precisely an instrumental that finds the squaring of the circle between the two souls of the album, the one more Nordic and dark and the other dreamlike and esoteric in the original sense of the term, more inclined towards stylistic exploration and destined to become dominant in the immediate future. "Uplands", seven minutes that initially represent the natural continuation of "Baltic Ice-Breaker": minimal electronics, a rarefied atmosphere that gradually evolves into a cadenced funeral march, but in the finale the situation changes abruptly, a synth intones an ascending and lush melody that sounds like an ideal rebirth, the passage to another season, another dimension, and an open window on what Bel Canto will soon become.

The artistic journey of Nils and Anneli is very coherent and planned, each album is a stage of a journey with a destination that each time becomes clearer and more defined; in "White-Out Conditions" the ship has just set sail from Tromso, the sometimes ruthless atmospheres and the allure of the Arctic are still well present, but the helmsmen already have in mind a route that will gradually lead them southward, toward the sun and colors of distant and unknown lands, almost tracing the footprints of their Viking ancestors. A first work but at the same time a transition, from which the class and ambition of a proposal certainly out of the ordinary already shine through, ready to move from the dark domain of Artemis to the soft lights of Aurora.