El Muniria
Stanza 218

Imagine yourself far away in an African hotel with a lit lamp and mosquitoes bothering you. An evening like many others, far from the noise of cars, immersed in the pleasure of a cigarette, a glass of whiskey.

Imagine yourself lying on the bed staring at the ceiling or leaning out of a window and starting to recount your feelings, your thoughts.

"Room 218" is all of this, a delicate and dreamy tale.

Emidio Clementi, after the closure of the Massimo Volume experience, returns to activity with El-Muniria, a project shared with Dario Parisini (ex-Disciplinatha) and Massimo Carozzi... a project with a difficult birth, beginning with the departure of the three to Marrakech with the desire to record and compose the entire material in a hotel room (specifically the "Massilia"); an original idea that, however, did not work as expected and the album was thus reshuffled and completed in Bologna. Clementi's narrative thus becomes a gigantic musical diary inspired by electronics, rock, dub experiments.

A happily nocturnal and enveloping album, sinuous and sensual... a long, highly evocative soundtrack, excellently constructed and refined in every part. The acidic dub with country references of "Santo", the guitars that fall like drops into a sink in "Shalimar Hotel", the hypnotic episodes of "Room 218" and "Sotto il Sole", the twilight atmospheres of "Fino in fondo", "Insieme" (splendid is the crossing of the Rhodes and the voice) and "Forse tra un attimo" (perhaps indebted to some works of Arab Strap), the rock tinges of "Narrating a photograph" with the vocal interpretation of Steve Piccolo. While all this flows, we imagine Clementi in the room with us, leaning out of a window, smoking a cigarette and telling us about life around the Shalimar Hotel.

A truly evocative album with a strong poetic charge, a record recommended for those who love to dream, cradling themselves in delicate and hypnotic atmospheres... "and may the day forget to arrive".