Dargen D'Amico
Nostalgia Istantanea

Dargen D’Amico is without a doubt one of the most eclectic figures in the Italian music scene, capable of ranging from unique collaborations (Ron, Max Pezzali, Enrico Ruggeri) to those more related to the Italian chart rap (Fedez, Fibra, J-Ax, Marracash), reaching indie (Perturbazione, Bugo, Amari) and experiments more inclined toward dance (Crookers, Dumbblonde, Two Fingerz), without forgetting the Macrobiotics project (reworkings of songs from the Italian tradition). From every featuring emerges a very personal style, which always manages to stand out even where the quality of the proposal is not excellent and which has led him to distance himself from genre clichés, surprising with lyrics, metrics, rhymes, and beats.

“Nostalgia Istantanea” is his most challenging and experimental album and represents (so far) his artistic peak. Composed of two tracks (the first 18 minutes and the second 20 minutes long) conceived as the A-side and B-side of a vinyl. The two tracks completely break away from both the song form and every rap cliché, even more so than what D’Amico has done in his previous works (see “Musica Senza Musicisti” and “Di Vizi Di Forma Virtù”). Two streams of (un)consciousness that, by the author's own admission, were composed "in the moments that follow and slightly precede sleep" and were inspired by “the Bible and the encyclopedia.” The themes range from religion to reflections on language, from death to love, from childhood to war, from society to art, forming an album that when analyzed in all its facets proves to be conceptually universal, all without ever appearing pretentious or verbose. Dreamlike and ironic, rich in metaphors and wordplay that lead to the deconstruction of the word itself, with disparate references (just to name a few, Carroll’s Alice, foie gras, Hadrian’s Wall), without any forced search for rhyme or choruses of any kind, D’Amico creates images that unfold on a sound carpet of hypnotic and minimal electronics.

“Nostalgia Istantanea” is an album that will hardly revolutionize anything given the limited audience it targets, but it constitutes a unique piece, both for the genre concerned and in the history of music, something that resembles nothing ever done before and that is unlikely to be repeated.