Confusional Quartet
Volare

1)

For instance, that time when Skiantos cooked spaghetti on stage, Confusional were there.

They played right before…

It was the “Bologna rock” festival, subtitle: “it hadn't happened in five centuries”.

At that time, Bologna was almost the center of the world, and confusional music represented it perfectly: it wasn't punk (except in attitude), and it wasn't even rock.

So, what was it?

Ah, confusional music was a kind of incurable jazz rock illness brawling with the skewed rhythms of post-punk, lots of riffs between silly and exciting shot at a thousand an hour. You’d almost think the Asinelli tower would really collapse.

(Damn, I could have been there too... it was '79, I was sixteen... but I wasn’t…)

(It doesn’t matter, I have the cassette of that concert, produced by Harpo’s bazaar, soon to become Italian Records).

2)

You can do anything, I guess. Like mixing Schönberg with Romagnolo folk dance or cherries with fricassee. Maybe it turns out well, maybe not.

The spark has value on its own, but often the proof of facts shows a different story.

Not all “why don’t we do it this way?” work... and in every respectable alchemical laboratory, you must watch where you walk not to step on failed experiment residues.

Only in art, the failure isn’t immediately noticeable... not to the artist, always indulgent with his creations, nor to the listener, entangled in the loop of historical/cultural coordinates of the moment. Then certain delicacies years later leave a cloying taste, and you need half a kilo of Citrosodina to digest them.

And anyway, may god bless all the “why don’t we do it this way?” And glory be upon the post-punk period when “you can do anything” was truly the rule. Not a week, not to mention a day, went by without a new kind of sound finding its way to your ears, mind, heart.

Many of those things have aged quite well, others now sound forced and in some cases, even ridiculous.

And, alas, most of the Italian new wave falls into the second category, not so much (or not only) because of the risks taken in the lab, but because, most of the time, it limited itself to revisiting the products emerging from other laboratories with little or no brilliance.

Then, of course, everyone (including us listeners, obviously) was in the ranks of the night shadows, parodic to the highest degree without realizing it.

However, there were brilliant exceptions, cases where mixing (apparently incoherently) the most varied elements yielded results worthy of the promised expressive freedom. And where one did not just mechanically repeat popular sounds (and underlying cultural references).

One of these exceptions is indeed the Confusional Quartet.

3)

Being original does not mean having no influences; it means having a unique and recognizable sound, in the case of Confusional, a fabulous hybrid between Area and Devo...

And Area/Devo, to return to where we started, is like saying fricassee and cherries: except it works… it works indeed... today almost more than back then.

And it’s not that they sometimes seem like Area and sometimes like Devo, no... they always (always!!!!) seem like Area plus Devo... and therefore neither one nor the other, but precisely their hybrid…

A hybrid that is only, and exclusively, the Confusional Quartet

Then Area plus Devo wasn’t something I said, they said it themselves. I mean, they said those were their idols. That’s why I decided to write the review. I wouldn’t have known how to handle it otherwise. It’s nice to say, oh yes, damn, it’s just like that.

Then again, obviously, it’s only partially like that. There’s a lot of other stuff in between: futurism, which was huge then... no wave, that was big too... and maybe, some minor late 20th-century deity blowing over the notes...

Yes, yes, a lot of other stuff…

But, anyway, Area plus Devo sounds good. And I like it a lot.

4)

Two more things.

They were an instrumental group, always a rather perilous business and one that, from the perspective of positioning within a market like the Italian one, never leads anywhere. Are you jazz musicians? No? Then how the heck do you dare produce instrumental music?

So, once more, kudos for their courage.

Additionally, they possessed that rare quality called irony. Sure, it was a characteristic of the place (Bologna) and of the times, think of Scozzari, Freak Antoni, groups like Stupid Set and Hi,Fi Brothers, certain imaginative, and to be honest, minoritarian, fringes of the political movements back then.

But all in all, it’s that little thing that almost made the Asinelli tower collapse… not the rock’s "r" that in the Bolognese festival’s poster, indeed, pierced (aided by the UFOs) the taller of the two towers.

Not the "r", but the "i" ...or who knows, maybe both together…

5)

“Volare,” a cover of Modugno’s famous song, and our group's first 45, is the perfect paradigm of their music.

It starts with a hyper acceleration in medias res, continues with a series of happily and frenetically absurd motifs (among which “Volare” is barely recognizable) and returns, closing the circle, to the initial hyper-kinesis.

The song, contrary to the aping of Anglo-American cultural references, is a retrieval, as crazy and bizarre as it might be, of Italian materials... a kind of Marinetti and Modugno arm in arm under the porticoes of Bologna.

“Nedbo Zip,” the b-side, is an almost Rock thing (oh almost, eh...) that by repeating the same riff differently, processes through accumulation and reaches a quite confusional finale with rare interludes.

And confusional means absurd and exciting... in short, a Madonna of a 45.

6)

After “Volare,” our group released what, for a long time, was their only album. It stands as one of the greatest masterpieces of the global Wave. Had they not been born in Bologna (even if Bologna was, for a moment, the center of the world) who knows what might have happened.

Trallallà…

And a kiss to modern art's mom (as long as she doesn't take herself too seriously)...