Flavio Giurato
Le promesse del mondo

The niche. What a lovely place, the niche.
It immediately makes you think of a warm kennel, sheltered from the storms of the world.
A place where you can be yourself, without mediation. Where you can relax and create freely.

If I had to name just one person to define the very concept of a "niche songwriter" in Italy, I would be torn between two artists: one with the surname Rossi, but obviously not Vasco.
His name is Fausto and he has painted some of the deepest pages of Italian music in the last thirty years.
The other is Flavio Giurato.

Someone who lets decades pass between one record and another, who dares to say that it can take a year to make a song right, and thus ten years for a new album is more than normal.
A craftsman of the chisel, with the look of a carpenter, of a woodcarver.

On stage, he is always dressed with unstudied shabbiness, like a laborer on a day off, and distills irony with a Roman accent free of vulgarity.
Since the early '80s, he has released, discounting some reissues, six quirky albums. The first in dialect, of poignant depth but still a bit unripe. The second, splendid ("Il tuffatore") which thanks to a keen expert like Carlo Massarini nearly brought him to a mainstream he never sought.

The third, "Marco Polo", remains to this day one of the most advanced concept albums in Italy. A kind of "Metal Machine Music". A knowing kick to all pop logic at a time when it was possible to become "someone" and make music his profession.
From there, from those endless mantras of a single phrase on assorted noises ("and here are the sailors pulling the ropes" repeated like a nightmare for endless minutes), the absolute oblivion.

Many years later, "Il manuale del cantautore" strung together a small collection of disjointed pearls and declared him still vital.
The rest is recent history: three years ago, with "La scomparsa di Majorana" Giurato painted one of the most fascinating - and lesser-known - canvases of his career.

Strangely, he did not wait the usual eight/ten years to return to storytelling: "Le promesse del mondo" arrived just a couple of years after the previous one, marking an unprecedented communicative urgency.
The new concept deals with immigration but, above all, with alienation and marginalization.
A slippery theme, at high risk of rhetoric. But Giurato does not know what rhetoric is. He is genetically immune to it.
His voice is carved in oak, solemn but not assertive, convincing but uncertain, always on the edge of a terrifying off-key moment that never comes (not even live).
An oak full of unresolved questions.

From "Soundcheck" to the leftist "I lupi", from the partisan dream of "Monte Salario" to the Latin surrealism of "Agua mineral", Flavio creates songs that resemble nothing but his own art, with subtle noise guitar vapors wrapping hypnotic rhythms and lyrics of an otherworldly beauty, reminding me of the most everyday Buzzati of that masterpiece that is "Un amore" and the same Buzzati grappling with the symbol of unresolved par excellence, the Bastiani Fortress of "Il deserto dei Tartari".

However, the ultimate gem of the album is "Digos", supported by a bare guitar and nothing more, in which decades of hypocrisies and unconfessable truths seem to crystallize, veiled by a tiny, heartbreaking, never-declared love story.
Flavio has nothing to teach because his lesson has no method that anyone can detect and transmit.

His way of writing, which jumps from high to low mixing Italian, foreign languages, and dialects in a torrential flow, is simply unique, often disturbing, full of extreme sincerity and roughness.
Flavio Giurato, with his Basaglia Law face, his eternal silences, and his heavy words, is the greatest mystery of Italian songwriting.
Not for everyone, in fact, only for the few who have the time and patience to dig in a raw clay that overflows with passion and wild genius.

For me, having discovered him on a tdk cassette recorded for me by a family friend when I was eleven, he will always remain a beacon in the fog, to be recommended only to those who are willing to pick pearls from the mud of the artistic catastrophe that is Italy in 2018.

So, I would recommend Flavio Giurato to UNESCO, to have him become a World Heritage Site.
Like Venice, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Flavio is a dinosaur that survived the mass extinction of an entire world of true artists, capable of creating literature in music without any concession to the market: a thing that can no longer be found anywhere.