Gianmaria Testa
Extra muros

"My rooster no longer wakes me
he is very old and doesn't distinguish if
it's day, evening, or night.
For me, I would settle for a crow,
a voice, a spit of greeting
but he sleeps
and even if he doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t know
if it's day or night..."

Somewhere in this earthly globe, there exists a trend that each of us has probably heard of at least once or twice in a lifetime: the so-called post-songwriter music. A phenomenon difficult to describe, especially for someone like me. Just as it is difficult to find artists that fit in that category, since I manage to find glimpses of this style in every kind of undervalued local music. Be it indie, lo-fi, or cantautorale.

But there's one artist who surely belongs to this category, especially considering that our record producers were as slow as snails when they finally discovered him. His name is Gianmaria Testa, singer and stationmaster at the same time, hailing from Cuneo (the homeland of Marlene Kuntz strikes again).

Initially a rock instrumentalist, he found his niche during the '90s. It was France that immediately noticed him in 1995 with the release under the Label Bleu of his first masterpiece, "Montgolfières" (of which I jealously own the first pressing, the one with the close-up of the hot-air balloon itself), a work I recommend everyone to acquire in any way because it’s impossible not to be struck by "Le Traiettorie Delle Mongolfiere" or "Come Le Onde Del Mare", not to mention "Maria"...

For "Extra-Muros," we'll have to wait a year. 1996, the same moment the label under which the album is released, Tôt ou Tard, is inaugurated.

The cover of the first edition, also French (also in my hands, very rare!) is very charming and depicts a little girl on a sidewalk next to a car.

The sounds retrace what the previous album already proposed, that is, sounds teetering between jazz, folk, and the singer-songwriter genre. The result this time is delightful as well. No less important are the lyrics, like stories of lived experiences that I think have happened to all of us. Alternative ways of tackling an "easy" theme like love ("Come Un'America", "Per Accompagnarti", "Via Da Quest'Avventura", the title track), a prologue of those journeys that Gianmaria himself will undertake later on ("Il Viaggio", "Un Po' Di Là Dal Mare", "Un'Altra Città", the latter written with guitarist Claudio Dadone), descriptions of peculiar characters ("Cavalli Di Frisia", "Joking Lady", "Il Mio Gallo", the latter having some swing tendencies, thanks to a David Lewis and a Jon Handelsman, respectively trumpet and saxophone, in a state of grace), that are no less important than the woman in the bar, Maria, the women in the stations he talked about a year ago, and even a piece in dialect ("La Ca Sla Colin-a").

Surprise. In the end, Testa seems to go crazy, falls into a state of hallucination, of meditation, audibly evident when listening to the conclusive "Canto", which we could define as a sort of immersion into those thoughts that each of us has inside, that desire, which will hardly come true, to know "from what secret rooms the song originates and from what distances, fears, anger, tenderness, or regret, and from what nostalgia takes voice and launches this long trail that even now and unpredictably carries us away". His voice, balancing between the gracefulness of Conte and the commitment of Fossati, strikes, and sometimes also makes one smile.

"Extra-Muros," just like "Montgolfières" and shortly afterward "Lampo," will be reissued (finally, I would add...) after the boom here in Italy of "Il Valzer Di Un Giorno," but with a different cover (a view of the moving sea) which in my opinion is not as good as the previous one, although still good.

You may ask me (and here I await the opinion of any Primiballi) "how do you at 18 know Testa?". Well, it all started while rummaging through the CDs of my father between the ages of 7 and 10, who in turn recorded them onto cassette tapes for me (those were the days...). Among Pino Daniele, Robert Wyatt, Lucio Battisti, the Beatles, Ivano Fossati, Almamegretta, and Ustmamò, this man from Cuneo was also among my cassette tapes.

From that day, I can't stop thanking my dad for doing me this favor.

Do the same. Even though we will probably continue to always be the usual niche.

But we know, we are in Italy... and it's not easy to emerge from certain abysses.