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Rating: 25 years have passed since the release of Epica Etica Etnica Pathos, the swan song of the CCCP.
Yes, people still talk about CCCP, as evidenced by the album cover, because for many connoisseurs (and not) this album should preferably be considered as the primary source of testimony of CSI rather than the last trace of CCCP.
From this consideration arises a reflection that goes beyond the purely musical context to touch on historical-political contexts and anthropological-religious territories.
Because 25 years is, perhaps, the right time to digest this milestone of music.
It was 1990, just after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and therefore in the last remnants of communist politics that had stood up to Western capitalism.
The CCCP were returning from a tour in Russia, accompanied by Litfiba (the ones from Desaparecido, to be clear): in short, the situation was comparable to when an astronaut, after years of study, research, training, and dreams, finally touches the lunar soil.
The name of the group CCCP was due to the fact that the music they composed was, in their words, "a pro-Soviet punk."
The USSR was the model, and they finally reached it, performing even in front of the Red Army; the consecration and achievement of a dream, as Lindo Ferretti himself likes to repeat.
And in the sharing of this unforgettable experience, from the still-untarnished 1989, friends Lindo Ferretti and Zamboni propose to Francesco Manganelli, Ringo de Palma, and Gianni Maroccolo, respectively keyboard, drums, and bass of their Litfiba comrades, to live for a while like a commune in a villa lost in the countryside (the one depicted on the cover) where they could release all the emotions accumulated together in the form of notes and words to be recorded rigorously live, so that the scent of that atmosphere could be breathed and listened to intact.
This album is therefore the sea of sensations where the emotional torrent of the group has flowed, from the journey from Russia to the countryside; from a drunkenness to a reflection, from an ideology to a conscious regret.
This CD represents the emblem of the dissolution of a Human dream into a Divine ether and therefore the passing of the baton from an ideological attitude to a mystical one.
Because Lindo Ferretti's generation was born and raised not with a desire for belonging, but with a necessity for belonging.
One had to choose between red and black, left and right, USSR or United States, Crujff or Beckenbauer.
And everything they believed in, everything they gave their voice and music for, was disintegrating before their eyes in a scattered countryside, just after their "mystical" journey in the lands of the clenched fist.
And this LP is a blend of nostalgia for what was and the desire to park the restlessness of the soul toward a sacred and sheltered shore.
It is an album that looks with distrust at the human race, abandoning itself to elsewhere.
Already in the title of the song that opens the album, one finds a well-hidden oxymoron, Aghia Sofia in other words Holy, Wisdom.
Faith and knowledge have never got along, unless forcing one into the other, leading to what Heidegger defined as an "iron wooden," something that cannot exist.
That cry "The modern initiate is over... Citizens" is the musical transposition of Munch's scream; "Look, Sofia, look at life flying away"..
It is a tragic album, that has lost the burlesque verve of punk; it is the story of a betrayed lover.
Therefore, from a stylistic and musical point of view, and thus also concerning the group members, it is legitimate to consider this CD as the first of a new formation; from the content and story it tells, I personally believe it is right to consider it as the last disillusioned letter from the CCCP to their audience.
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