Chat Noir
Difficult To See You

Hard to see you, dear R.
Hard to glimpse your profile amidst this flood of people... your fragile face is reflected on a thousand other faces, your lips on a thousand other lips, your beautiful black hair on a thousand other heads. This continuous play of my mind is just the desire to remember you in every tiniest detail, to cling to your image: to stay alive as well. Who has never felt this feeling?
The people, this shapeless mass of bodies flattens and nullifies me and you R., makes us indifferent to each other: the colors fade and everything turns into a black and white film seen hundreds of times... everything disappears, places empty out, eyes dim, the sun dims, while you and I drift apart each with our load of questions and tears.
The only spectator to all this is a black cat, a silent and detached presence. Its eyes are two golden pearls, the only source of light in this gray painting; along with it, two other black cats ready to start their sabbath in your honor, R...

If it's hard to see you, then I abandon myself to the memory and listen....

The three little animals start playing, and immediately the surrounding environment transforms: their music takes on the form of an inner journey, made of memories and thoughts transfigured into living notes. One cat (Michele Cavallari) delicately plays a piano and synthesizers with its soft paws, another (Luca Fogagnolo) plucks with its bushy tail its double bass and electric bass while the third (Giuliano Ferrari) moves its whiskers to the calm yet well-supported rhythm of the drums. Their meow is completely different from all other cats: Chat Noir loves jazz, but not so much the "smoky" and warm kind from clubs but rather the one with a north-European matrix, cold, evocative, dilated and more melodic. Despite their name, a true fortune for our ears.
Being the good cats they are, they couldn't care less about everything happening around them, not wanting to simply belong to just one genre, but purring to a certain rock (mainly post rock) and especially to the most atmospheric and ambient electronica.

The result of this very personal alchemy is their third album, "Difficult To See You" from 2008. "Old" and "new", past and present chase each other and hold hands in the music of the trio, continuously altering, track by track, our moods: "Rovine circolari" rips our soul apart, welcoming us into an uneasy and surreal atmosphere (thanks also to a constantly dilated guitar in the background), then lulls us with a lullaby with an electronic flavor; "Plateau", with its sweet and simple piano melody, will strike you at the heart, just like R.'s now distant eyes. The cats have us in their grip, and the more we watch their moves, the more we are enchanted: from the thirteen minutes of "Crisi di assenza" (with another cat, Gianluca Petrella, playing the trumpet), to the abstract and electronic strokes of "Creative Chaos", to the exciting and tumultuous crescendo ending of "To Build A Fire", it is a continuous succession of music never for its own sake, but always with a clear goal in mind, which is to move the listener through all the languages music speaks.
The last fantastic track, "The Snail", with its slow and melancholic pace, bids us farewell from this black and white dream stained with rain, to the tune of cello and piano (where certain Chopinian echoes can also be heard).

The three Italian cats have finished playing, slowly slipping into the shadows, looking at us with a sly and satisfied gaze. They know they have overwhelmed us for better or for worse, and that they simply did not want to prove anything to anyone: the only ones who need to prove to themselves that they can bear the weight of their emotions are us.
...isn't that right, R.?