Edda
Semper Biot

Those who loved Ritmo Tribale waited for him for 14 long years, and he has returned, as if nothing had happened, during these years of gossip, words, denials, rumors that have said everything and the opposite about his disappearance from the scene. But today, Thursday, September 10, 2009, I have in my hands his first solo work that with a single stroke wipes away years of chatter. It is now right to speak of this wonderful work, because it is Stefano Rampoldi himself who tells us, completely baring himself, about his last fifteen years of life.

"Semper Biot," always naked and so be it. An album, whose title says it all. Edda, through 12 poetic watercolors in cryptic lyrics and musically sparse, completely bares himself, performing a fabulous cutting job that gives the songs that magic which his incomparable voice transforms into something unique, at least here in Italy.

Songs of suffering, sad but full of life lived always on the margins, small frescoes of metropolitan poetry that lay bare feelings, loves, illusions of life that in the blink of an eye turn into disillusions, hopes, existential questions that seem to have no answers or if they do, they never match your expectations. "Semper Biot" is not an easy album. It penetrates you slowly until you find small fragments of other songs, dialect phrases, citations, and references behind the lyrics that at first listen leave you disoriented.

Aided by friends Walter Somà, with whom he wrote most of the songs, and Andrea Rabuffetti for the purely musical part, this album completely leaves aside the electricity of the last known Edda, the one who sang on "Psychorsonica" (1995) of Ritmo Tribale, to embrace a completely acoustic sound made of acoustic guitars, mandolins, banjos, double basses, the violin of guest Mauro Pagani in the opening "Io e te" but also pianos, organs, clarinets, saxophones, percussions used in an almost light manner without disturbing too much the lyrics, true protagonists of the work, produced by Taketo Gohara who was able to unite it all in a homogeneous way.

His voice is still capable of leaving shivers in the air and on the skin, as his recent live performances testify. "Milano", "Amare te", "Bella come la luna", "Fango di Dio" are just titles that will never become classics for the masses, but they already are for those like me who waited with hope for his return.

"I want to die happy to die / I want to get sick so as not to suffer / I want to see how I end up / I want to go crazy so as not to heal / where do my desires go / a wave will beach them sooner or later / what do I know about the sun? only the shadow / who yogini choose a center and moon / Stefano means nothing / don't see anything / get out of here / with a true desire you must choose which one it is / you are the anal of my dreams, my dear / you are the anal of my dreams..." _{(from "Yogini")}

Welcome back and thank you.