Eleventh Dream Day
Prairie School Freakout

According to the Italian esotericist and alchemist of the eighteenth century Giuseppe Giovanni Battista Vincenzo Pietro Antonio Matteo Franco Balsamo (frugality, at least in names, was not considered in those times) or more simply Cagliostro, the reliability of dreams is intrinsically linked to the lunar phases and the dream of the eleventh day from the new moon is the one that, always reading from his interpretations, could come true within a week. The illustrious esotericist, just for the record, was not an assiduous seeker of scientific knowledge, nor a missionary of progress; quite the opposite, he was defined by Giacomo Casanova as "a lazy genius" who frolicked through the European courts, more specifically in the bedrooms of bourgeois maidens whom he often accompanied, even earning a complaint for exploitation of prostitution (go figure he was the first "pimp" in history!). Let's pick up the thread; all this to say that I don't have a great deal of trust in the theories of the picturesque character, perhaps inspired by a grope, but a dream (one of those rare ones that I grant myself with closed eyes) has awakened my curiosity. There's Rick Rizzo walking down an isolated street in Chicago, which is actually London which, in the grotesque dreamlike evolution, is a village in the urban area of Bari. Suddenly, Neil Young and Tom Verlaine appear before him, I try to enter my own dream here too (I complicate my life even while inert!), but every attempt is in vain. The two hand a guitar to Rizzo and utter strange words that I, in the struggle for a mere appearance in my extrasensory activities, cannot decipher. I wake up with a start, with a sensation of burning mockery while in the headphones "Tarantula" relentlessly plays telling me that "Prairie School Freakout" is still there spinning on the turntable. The enchanting areas of the record captivate my attention, but I find room for a series of reflections: who knows if the debut day of Eleventh Dream Day was dreamed of eleven days earlier. Why did Mr. Rizzo choose this name? For good luck? Did it sound good? Was he a follower of the strange theories of Mr. "WhenNotHumpingIHaveFunTheorizingBullshit"?

However it went, history has been unjust and irreverent towards the Chicago band. "Prairie School Freakout", the band's first long player after the self-titled EP, acclaimed by the specialized press, hit record stores in 1988 produced by Amoeba Records. The album was actually recorded in July of the previous year, in just six hours (11:00 pm - 5:00 am) and in one take, allowing fuzz and distorted amplifiers to give a lo-fi sound to the entire work. All the elements suggest that something different is about to be born. America has gifted us with Hüsker Dü's hardcore, the most alluring noise from Sonic Youth, and is about to birth a new extraordinary creature, Eleventh Dream Day, located in an ideal middle ground between the past and the imminent Grunge Era. "Watching The Candles Burn", "Through My Mouth", "Beach Miner", explosive force and devastating sonic impact, have an original DNA and seem destined to find a place on the evergreen list of rock history, but life, like dreams, often takes paths different from our expectations, reducing them to soap bubbles that burst upon touching ground. "Prairie School Freakout" does not have the media impact that insiders hope and dream for, forever relegating the group's name to an unknown underground dimension. Eleventh Dream Day continued to record albums, collecting a considerable number of releases, the latest being "Works For Tomorrow" in 2015, but the first, promising LP that should have unshackled the band's name has traced an inexorable low-profile line in the career of the Chicago group.

"Prairie School Freakout" will remain a cult album for music lovers, the famous Cagliostro has long occupied pages of history books and I, in my rare dreams with closed eyes, search in vain for three individuals on the streets of Chicago, pardon, Bari!