Fausto Rossi
Cambiano le cose

A strange kind of East, sounds that settle on the world like silence on a flower...

Fire and snow, a face behind a window...

Scattered sheets of intimate existential haikus where every word is worth approximately a million pages...

It was a blow to the heart "Cambiano le cose", and not just because we hadn’t heard that voice for seven years and Faust'ò returned to being Fausto Rossi.

It’s that we would have expected anything, but not an album like this, strange as that may seem, considering that surprises were not new to him.

“Love story”, for example, with those obsessive rhythms marked here and there by ghostly voices, had been a fabulous commercial suicide. Something a little too far from previous pop albums. Albums that, even though derivative, drove us literally crazy.

It was great having our own BowieByrneFoxxRotten, preaching in the Italian desert.

A guy who, when he left the recording studio to take a pee, would return to hear things like “oh, Fausto, look we added this prog keyboard piece, isn’t it cool”. Yes, right...

And then that voice, those words...Oh, I remember that summer humming “Ultimi fuochi”. Orsetto called it the samurai anthem.

“And I my back against the wind”

In “Love story”, written entirely in English, it was exactly that humming I missed. But otherwise everything was fine, that pared-down sound (remove, remove, and remove again) that went straight to the core of the wave essence was very, very exciting.

Extreme though. Too extreme. Even for patrons most accustomed to experimentation. If you then consider that in his intentions it was supposed to be a triple album...

Although, of course, suicide for suicide, a triple would have been a godsend.

Before “Love Story”, there was another madness, that “Out now”, a splendid album of pure experimentation and research, moreover only instrumental. A little thing based, so the experts say, on concrete music. Not bad for a nearly famous guy whom you sometimes saw on TV in various discoring shows and the like.

They say that Maionchi still thinks about the wasted commercial potential of ours.

In any case, who knew "Out now"? Released in very few copies, they didn’t even include it in official discographies at that time. And to think that it was the first punch thrown at his own myth.

If we had known it, “Cambiano le cose” wouldn't have been the heart blow it was.

Yes, a blow to the heart...

With those sounds returning to themselves, enriched gradually by infinitesimal variations, with those circles in the water widening infinitively, and those refractions, those mirror games...

With that slow layering of meditative luminous energy combined with dark anxieties and new ghosts...

With those very short texts, which, cut with scientific precision by a sort of interior cut-up, let only keyword through the sieve...

And that voice that seems to sing only to itself in a kind of resigned indolence and renunciation of the fabulous hysterics of the past and that martial arts cry that excited us so much...

A blow to the heart, as we said right from the start.

Because track one, “In tuo ricordo”, is a percussive echo of small and strange gongs crossed by hypnotic waves, with a million silvery sparks exploding in a dark and restrained final noise making.

Imagine a dark ambient that lands the blow and does not just dance around the opponent, achieving as an unexpected effect an internal resonance that heals and cures. And this despite the sounds being shrouded in anguish.

And the rest of the program is no less, indeed. The pieces all resemble each other a bit; the mood is the same. It seems more like a suite than a set of songs.

Sometimes it's a poignant melancholy made of the slightest shadow vibrations taking you by the hand, with an undertone of renunciation and autumn that from sounds reaches words. Sometimes it’s the usual ghosts fighting with a kind of mysticism made of solitude and silence.

And perhaps the titles of certain songs are enough to explain everything: “La tentazione di esistere”, “Lacrime”, “Il cielo si trasforma”, “Guarda l’autunno”, “Il fiore a cui pensavo”.

“Lacrime”, amidst this dark well of wonders, however, deserves a special mention. Led by the same percussive sounds of “In tuo ricordo”, it gradually charges itself with a particular tension, aided by a series of sampled voices in the background.

The singing when it arrives is the usual for the whole album, apathetic and resigned: “E poi si scioglie la neve e il mondo resta a guardare, ogni cosa finisce...”

Then, here’s the flash from other times, here’s again the hysterical voice we well know, quoting the first line of Allen Ginsberg's howl: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness...”. Here come the tears. To close, like a magical and unconscious counterpoint, the phrase “All’improvviso un’altra estate” repeated twice. An absolute and incredible magic.

At the end of the album arrives, splendidly incongruous, “Morbide macchine”. It's the only pop moment and it serves to emerge a moment from the fog which then immediately returns with an ultra-dark instrumental...

What to say in the end?

This is a very, very underrated work. And I never understood why. It is usually considered cold. I do not agree. There’s fire beneath that ice.

It is intimate, collected, powerful.

Listen to it, perhaps with eyes closed. You will not regret it.