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A frozen and infamous youth. But perhaps that's precisely why it's indelible.
We all want to stop time; it's a visceral matter. And so, we leave things maniacally where they are, to endure the dust of days.
Take Federico.
Federico is twenty at the beginning of the Eighties and he wears out his eyes on the maudits. He plays Joy Division and dreams of a cursed life à la Rimbaud. Federico, a Florentine, embodies all its flaws and virtues: haughty, aloof, a jerk yet sincere. He will be a songwriter unique in his own way, but he doesn't know that yet.
In the meantime, he plays hard and shadowy rock. But poetry, the art of putting words in sequence, he already loved that madly back then (and he will love it madly forever). And how can one love poetry at twenty? As the art of sublimating everyday crap into raw, opalescent, and eternal diamonds.
1984. Federico strings words together and invents a world remembered for pretend. Under the lash of a (cat)arctic wind, he plays Siberia, which resonates of Russian novels, Paul Verlaine, restless tumult, and Amsterdam. The music is indeed harsh, vitriolic, but not like before. Before, the anger was raw and crude, now it seems eroded by a faceless, nameless melancholy and rendered, thus smoothed, perfect. Miro's voice, then, seems made precisely for those words and sounds.
I won't say more because this record must simply be listened to.
2016. Federico has come to terms with the ebb of time and for almost forty years has traveled a path inevitably different from that of his youth. Walking the confidential path of a hermit with an acoustic guitar clutched in hand and with the thinly veiled desire to string words together, day after day, he has perhaps accepted no longer being the person of yesteryear.
And in this perfect solitude, today Federico returns to Siberia, and the elapsed time feels unbearably heavy on you: the landscape is unrecognizable and the music, once sharp, has become gentle. None of that fragile perfection shines before us any longer. Little more than twenty, the urgency to speak had engraved a thousand folds of a nocturnal, arrogant world that in the mild lights of today—retraced by someone now sixty—proudly displays itself in all its youthful naivety.
As for me, since like everyone I wish I could stop time, I will continue, again and again, to return to the Siberia of back then, and wander there, in the early morning lights, among workers who go to or come back from God knows where, or with those of them who stayed behind to listen to the frost of their breath, absorbed in God knows what thought.
Perhaps because, unlike Federico, I have yet to accept the smoothing of days and the cruelty of time.
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