Emilio Scalise
A Mezza Voce

Rewrite the history of electronic music. Or at least try to trace it "ab ovo," as it could have been. In his first recording effort, Emilio Scalise, a young and little-known synthesist of the underground Roman scene, creates a work that has little to do with the contemporary electronic scene and the current concept that the term "experimentation" has assumed in this field. A work that in its own way manages to be radical, disorienting, profoundly innovative, and yet reactionary, "traditional" if one can speak of tradition.

An inattentive listener would easily confine this album to the limbo of the nostalgic or the already heard. Because "A mezza voce" is a bit of everything. Or at least everything that rests forgotten under thirty years of dust. There is much of the German cosmic couriers, of musicians (or non-musicians) celebrated like Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, like Eno and Vangelis. Echoes of ambient music here and there, symphonic colorings with a classical flavor (with all due respect), digressions easily enumerated by the aforementioned listener within that cauldron of everything and nothing that goes by the name of New Age music. Yet Emilio Scalise is much more. In potential perhaps, almost suggested between the grooves of still immature, rudimentary, rather raw tracks (even though this too can be attributed to a precise declaration of intent). As if whispered, in a low voice, as if implied and delivered this way to the listener (this time, yes, the attentive one), the revolution is there. A revolution that, in being above all different from what contemporary electronic music is, primarily means reaction.

A revolution with suffering, painful, and low tones as can be, despite the enormous disproportion, a Mahler symphony or a track from the album "Alpha Centauri," that is, through an unchanged and presumably unchangeable poetic language. A language that, Scalise wagers, still has immense expressive possibilities, capable of ennobling the compositional form that is electronic music to the highest artistic peaks. As they say, it's the intention that counts. Because at its core, "A mezza voce" is a work that aims to be poetic, and only partially succeeds. Sometimes with the subdued, "shrunken" tones of the crepuscular poets, sometimes through the vehement lyricism of a melodic recitative from grand opéra, sometimes with the visionary, apocalyptic suggestions (still in the subdued composure typical of the author's language) of much modern poetry (Allen Ginsberg?). Scalise's music is a continuous flow of modules, frequencies, liquid sounds that succeed one another with no apparent order and are distinguished by complete thematic freedom and the absence of recognizable subjects or phrases. Semi-improvised compositions of predominantly free character, where even dissonances and polytonality participate in that poetics of the undefined, also a precious heritage from literature, which Scalise seems to favor: the distance from contemporary electronic music could not be more palpable. Contributing "Wagnerianly" to the sense of indefiniteness is the absence of valid harmonic, melodic, rhythmic references (a continuous flow without time, without tonality that recalls the "infinite music" of the German master), and even timbral.

The track that opens the album, "Creazione," is certainly the most valid testimony of the artistic results that this symphonically styled "sonic blend" for an orchestra of old analog synthesizers can achieve, with a continuous unfolding of periods halfway between sound and noise, leading to the enunciation of a pseudo-theme of only two chords that then flows towards a more meditative conclusion. A less successful experiment, perhaps, in "Illuminazione (alogena)" and "Sic transit...," where the music becomes more ethereal, imaginative, with more or less observant respect for the good manners of harmony. Approximate mixing, low fidelity. But even this is programmatic, clear. Definitely more intimate are the tracks "Speranza" or the static "Campane a Novi Sad," an impressionistic sketch for musically insane ears, like the successful "Presagio di sventura," the only track for conventional instruments (not too conventional either) or the chart-topping single "Sempre." To seal it, "War," the most moving moment of the album, and the most successful piece of Emilio Scalise's otherwise short career, a promising, potentially great, still elusive artist.

We await a follow-up, confident that he will clarify his intentions in the direction we hope for.