•
Rating: This album is not easy to find.
Let's start by stating that, because a series of unfortunate circumstances has made it so that a work of significant objective value is unavailable to the progressive rock audience - or perhaps 'art rock', or perhaps alternative rock - since the early '80s, due to a distribution that calling clandestine would be an understatement. I have seen it sold online for about fifty dollars, but these are vg copies, certainly not excellent or mint (let alone ss!), but one might try hunting down a CD reissue from Cosmorecord if it can still be found (it's from 1997). Why all this, when much less deserving albums have received attention even from Repertoire, or Rhino, or Sundazed, whichever one you prefer?
The reason lies in the fact that this is an album recorded in Rome in 1979 by three neo-fascists, Mario Ladich (drummer of Janus) and the Frenchmen Olivier Carrè, singer, and Jack Marchal, a multi-instrumentalist of the project. The album was recorded in a few days (apparently in the premises of a Fronte della Gioventù section) and printed in a very limited edition for the Signal label, indeed inaugurating it, and was distributed solely in the offices of the Movimento Sociale Italiano and 'Europa' bookstores belonging to the same political party, which are rather scarce (there was only one in Rome, for example). The spontaneous nature of the collaboration between musicians from different countries, with an artistic path but also a life path that would soon take divergent roads, would prevent the trio from performing at the Campi Hobbit concerts (only a solo participation of Jack Marchal in 1981) and let alone any other stage would have wanted to host concerts of openly fascist branding, especially in those years. All the artists of the MSI or Terza Posizione circle (some were truly talented, not just an attempt by Pino Rauti to occupy a piece of musical culture) would remain confined to the very narrow circle of party sections, the three Campi Hobbit – not exactly Monterey – and a few sporadic and pathetic performances in Predappio, usually interrupted by the police. I would have had no qualms about attending one of their concerts, except for the hooligans that would have crowded it and for the known unavailability of neo-fascists to engage in anything other than beatings and Nazi chants (remember the Illinois Nazis?). I would have been stabbed and wouldn't be here writing today.
I have already written about my political affiliation, visceral and convinced, to the opposite side, and I am convinced that neo-fascist 'culture' (books, records, theater) has never conquered spaces mostly due to its mediocrity: they had Evola, more or less a charlatan copying Jung and giving himself esoteric airs like the Neapolitan proletarian Giuseppe Balsamo; they had Ezra Pound, who may have been a distinguished writer but besides copying Joyce was also notoriously psychotic; they had Oreste Lionello, not exactly Vittorio Gassman, and they could have had Albertazzi if he hadn't always kept his political affiliation silent, for fear of having to answer for the atrocities committed in Salò. Little else, and especially a youth movement that rather than understanding and interpreting art, understood chains and clubs (ask the squadrista Alemanno) and had little to do with guitar and poetry, even just as a spectator. It is true that the cultural hegemony of the left would have prevented any yearning coming from the right, but it is also true that there were no noteworthy yearnings, with the sole exception of this beautiful album.
'Science Et Violence' has a beautiful artwork, and an internal booklet with lyrics in French and Italian, and it doesn't have a Side A and a Side B but a Face Blanche - conventionally understood as side A - and a Face Noir, corresponding to the genre of compositions: progressive the former, more intense and rocking the latter. The most 'well-known' track, and also the only one mentioned on YouTube, is 'Derriere Ta Porte', eight minutes of highly emotional alternative rock intensely interpreted by Olivier Carrè's voice, especially in the 'theatrical' interlude, also considering the strongly anti-bourgeois message that paradoxically (but not too much) brings the meaning of this beautiful song closer to Faber's 'Canzone Di Maggio'. (Why not too much? Because the demands of the Social Right, which today are often taken up by Casapound, albeit instrumentally, were not so distant from those of the extra-parliamentary left: housing and work for everyone, hatred for America and a desire to counter it with Europe, disdain for the bourgeois who did not take a stand and were afraid of change).
Pearls on this album include 'On Efface Tout', a joyful declaration of total change somewhat predictable but again very heartfelt, and above all the suite 'Parcours', sixteen remarkable minutes of chiaroscuro and distorted guitars 'a la Faust', 60s keyboards and an overall krautrock atmosphere that make it an unrecognized masterpiece, even with lyrics that openly lament Mussolini. Obviously, the true mastermind of the album is Jack Marchal, an excellent guitarist and keyboardist who would reappear a few years later in a couple of electronic music productions: Jack is a cartoonist, writer, political activist very present in the Italian and French reality of those years, and has recently resumed making music with the group Elendil (a Tolkien character, unsurprisingly). I haven't heard them and I haven't sought them out, if I get the chance I will listen to them with interest.
The fact remains that this album is truly beautiful and it's a shame it can't be retrieved from the rightful oblivion of those dark years, also because not all albums by Inti Illimani are honestly always digestible (!).
Loading comments slowly
