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Rating: THE DISCIPLINE OF THINGS
"If you're looking for a theme, here it is: life, starting from the heartbeat." (Roger Waters)
Monte Arci in Sardinia must have been another remarkable place of choice and elevation. The musical life of Gianni Maroccolo seems to be marked by encounters and places of rural and marine levitation. Rio Saliceto - Brittany - Val d'Orcia - Cilento. Of course, Via dei Bardi, in Florence.
How a workshop in Puglia and a first meeting of a couple of days can change life and make it take unexpected paths. In Puglia, Gianni Maroccolo meets, a few years ago, Claudio Rocchi: singer-songwriter, writer, producer, poet, bassist in the first album under the name Stormy Six (The Ideas of Today for the Music of Tomorrow), director of the film Pedra Mendalza, publisher (Re Nudo), leading exponent of the psychedelic folk of the sixties/seventies in Italy, solo and in collaboration with Paolo Tofani of Area, author of two albums with CRAMPS by Gianni Sassi and Sergio Albergoni, Hindu monk for three decades, radio presenter and founder, first in Italy with Radio Krishna Centrale, then in Kathmandu where he founded the Himalayan Broadcasting Company (HBC).
During the workshop days, Maroccolo is preparing an album, intending to leave his activity after this work to focus solely on production, but his admirers and Rocchi will dissuade him from this plan, and the album, from a farewell work, transforms into the work of Rebirth. Rocchi and Maroccolo get to know each other, examine each other, discover themselves as concordant spirits, begin to love each other, despite their artistic backgrounds being evidently very distant, with Claudio deeply connected to the sixties and seventies, a follower of oriental philosophies, almost disdainful of the eighties, and Gianni instead never too attached to progressive and formed and developed precisely in those European eighties marked by new wave, synth-pop, post-punk. Gianni asks Claudio to collaborate on his album, possibly contributing lyrics and even working on the composition of the music. What emerges from the Super-Duo is VDB23/Nulla è andato perso.
Initially published in 2013, funded through crowdfunding (at a time when this practice was not yet customary), it was reissued in 2015 for all music stores, and follows nine years after A.C.A.U. - La nostra meraviglia (2004), Maroccolo's first "multi-soloist" album. Recorded mainly between Bicocca di Cecina and Marrubiu in the province of Oristano, under Monte Arci. Original artwork and a production of the utmost respect that smells of Asian craftsmanship wrapped in Nepalese paper and stamped with island ink. Almost entirely Made in Sardinia, as a deserved spiritual tribute to the Island that hosted its conception and flowering.
Vdb23 stands for Via dei Bardi, the mythical street in Florence where in the eighties Maroccolo took his first steps in music. The original civic number, where this happened, was 32, here reversed to 23. An important number for the two musicians, meaning a lot, but here its meaning was interpreted mainly as transformation, change, rebirth.
The Bar Do indicates an intermediate stage, suspended between death and the next rebirth, at the edges of life, Tibetan Book of the Dead, DOLGOPAX. Rocchi and Maroccolo both came from difficult periods of physical and spiritual pain, VDB23 is the answer to all this.
This is a work, not a mere album, carrying with it all the heaviness of a lifetime and all the aches and encumbrances of human bodies that suddenly find a preferential path and, reconciled, take flight into space. Water (Maroccolo) and Fire (Rocchi): two elements that meet and create a third, the air that evaporates and rises into the sky. Kundalini, Neptune. What emerges is a hard and painful, emotional, and moved album, often marked by a certain anger yet triggered by a profound love for things, for people, for creation, and existence. This popular sentiment arises from divine mechanics. An artifice of two men who, despite disappointments, show gratitude and wonder at the intermediate passage of earthly life. A liquid album, hard to classify, floating beyond genres between Industrial Rock, Psychedelia, Folk-Tronica, and Electronica, an album that succeeds in achieving the sublime, in transversal traversal: against a backdrop of some passages of violent music adjacent to chants of magnanimity of disarming human generosity, in almost, but not quite, progressive, but rather evolved and evolutionary plots.
"Vdb23" opens the collection. Maroccolo's introductory basso_pneumatico recalls, in character, the ultra-distorted one from "Narko'$". As with many tracks on the album, this is divided into sections: initial chaos, a folk-psychedelic interlude that lasts only a few moments, a sung part that marches similar to "Hiding All Away" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in writing and sound, tense discharge final para-industrial, Rocchi's music narrative solemn yet stern:
"I've noticed constants: that worlds and universes are also made of deceptions,
of lands without waters, and bad habits often win the races
and gentle souls find themselves in the corners, embarrassing swamps,
overwhelmed by arrogances, delusions of power, explicit deceptions, repeated jealousies.
How not to believe, from time to time, in error to the nth degree
of something that escapes, that the supposed Lord would have caused DAMAGE [...]
Killed animals, killed men and children, killed women,
elders, killed certainties, the routes that lead to safety,
killed stars that teach the way, songs that save lives,
killed Fairies [...] by actions without dream
so let's not speak anymore of hypotheses and tragedies,
we sit on chairs that welcome our best thoughts
and we are grateful for the hunger we manage to satisfy,
to overwhelm in the food we love to eat,
in the chosen drinks we want to drink [...]
See, see how, see how I am, see how I am ALIVE?"
Rocchi is in a state of grace. Powerful words. All his vital essence enclosed and expressed in the way he pronounces that line: "See how I am ALIVE?", in the way his voice releases that word: ALIVE! At that height and with that tone, in the seemingly ingenuous yet crystalline voice of that 60-year-old lies a whole existence. Ingenuity is conscious and let it be praised for that, but obviously, Rocchi is anything but an ingenuous character. After a frantic beginning of mounting electronics, "Torna con me", the second track, transforms into a magmatic dub from an electronic forest with which the two would have wanted to participate in Sanremo, to "occupy spaces to change the state of things" as Rocchi used to suggest to Maroccolo. It would have been great to see them burst in like a hypothetical supergiant swooping on that stage and then watch them inevitably sucked back into that equally hypothetical nebula that had generated them, but the festival selectors made sure it didn't go that way... But it matters little. VDB23 is a special album, where underground waters meet, where two souls unexpectedly find themselves kindred and provide ecstasy by violating the law of gravity. An album that is ideally the entire musical journey of Maroccolo, from the beginnings to today and the day after tomorrow. A rich album where there is the mysticism of C.S.I., the spaceship of the Deproducers, the theater of Litfiba and Beau Geste, starting from Via dei Bardi, arriving on a star. "Rinascere Hugs Suite" is the best example of this ideal consortium where the best thoughts expressed among the best minds of Italian independent music meet across a temporal parabola widened over years and years. A "Tele-Composition" on QWERTY, over twenty minutes long where different moods and candors alternate, but ultimately syncretic. Sassolini begins "Defying the discipline of things", then comes the turn of the arabesque vocal skips of Donà in the fairy-tale spaces of the fantastic: "Rebirth to those who know how to return, rebirth to those who know how to fall, rebirth to those who know how to die, rebirth to those who know how to change color, like larches in autumn, the larches sing the autumn". Splendid is the otherworldly attack of Battiato, just as splendid are the piano bridge of Alessandra Celletti and the sitar of Beppe Brotto (who accompanied Maroccolo, together with the visual artists Masbedo for some live dates). But if Rocchi's Magic Flight is the Epic, Battiato is the Ethic, Pelù is the Ethnic, then Clementi spreads everyone out like clothes hung out to dry for Pathos and lyrics, imagining a race in an ambulance towards a hospital and the hope of not leaving, confronting oneself with a mostly gloomy thought directed to objects, clothes, books, vestiges that testify to us the departure of the affections (considerations also recently found in the film Mia Madre):
"Nurse friend, listen do you hear it too outside the window
this smell of pines, of sea, of burnt tires, of tar
but now run friend, now run because the blood the heart doesn't wait
run friend, run and please don't stop talking
about the house by the sea, the windows to be puttied, the children to raise
about how time marks and escapes away faster than this ambulance [...]
the Aurelia at dawn smells of sea, of pines, of torn pages [...]
but in the meantime run friend, run
because I left my things as if I never went away
my records, my strings, the clothes hung out to dry, my room,
my imprint on the pillow her shadow bent over my face
friend, run run..."
Maroccolo hasn't left. Gianni is here and this work represents his human and artistic vitality, a work that forces, indeed liberates, to the disarmament mentioned above. Reminiscent of the out-of-sync mornings (after nights of concerts and rehearsals) while not-watching but listening to the music of a cartoon, in Florence, it's the turn of the delightful and heartfelt interlude of "La Melodie de Terrence" by Takeo Watanabe with Renzulli as a guest (yes, him).
In an era in which, desperately, there is a need for one's own evolution, detached from common rules, from this false personality VDB23 arrives and contributes to nourishing the mind, body, and spirit, an album that smells of good air of nature, of an ideal good family air that pervades and leaves serene and satiated, despite the shocks of the day.
Tears are hardly held back on "LD7M (les dernières sept minutes de mon père)", but in the end why hold them back? Perhaps it would be good and healthy to let them go. "LD7M" is characterized by esraj and sitar that, like sacred mountains, arouse intuitions of eternity. A story of the last moments of a life, it makes one think of occurrences that, sooner or later, affect everyone, and this indeed is often a frightening thought. But "LD7M" describes a sweet end, an opening to a peaceful passing, at peace with the middle age of confusion.. "Seven minutes, so many things to do [...] That is my son, his music assails me, all his notes are the feelings I want to celebrate [...] how many victories I have avoided [...] Maybe I am eternal, maybe it's just winter [...] this body must be left, I do not inhabit comfortably [...] I have left the body, I am here". Marok had asked for a Hymn to Life, Claudio complies, and the evolutions of "LD7M" are pulsations without background that are Signals of Life. Boundless. Infinite.
"Space and time finally dilated out of the prison that masked them [...] finally serene [...] shall we exit the past that devastated us?" ("Una Corsa")
"The best mirror is an old friend" said George Herbert, a 17th-century British poet. Claudio and Gianni were not old friends, their love affair took place over a few years. Despite this, Gianni was certain of knowing each other deeply for a long time, forever. They traversed parallel paths made of physical and inner pain, but there were, luminous, signs of a new life, a life closing for both and a new one being born, because the concept of time is not eternity that contains it, it is relative like the apparent reality of things. In many parts of the album, Claudio's suffering is perceived, his sense of the impending time of departure is evident. Claudio Rocchi left his body to the earth on June 18, 2013, close to the publication of the album, Marok (writes in the booklet) terribly feels his absence, but also his closeness, looking for him in other gazes. He continues to feel his presence, and Claudio is certainly and indeed here, through his artistic and human legacy. Close for Propinquity, passing through and challenging the discipline of incomprehensible codes, at "low lights, so that the moon may illuminate." Very low lights, under a sky that continues to fall, with impressions chosen from another time.
Just as Miranda from Picnic at Hanging Rock recited: "There is a time and a place for everything to begin and end", there are suitable places and circumstances for listening to music, according to the writer. I own copy no. 828 of one thousand of the album. I would have liked to listen to it for the first time on a sunny winter afternoon, but it happened to listen to it on a snowy and eternal winter afternoon, a day I will remember as everything life can take away but also return. We will not be here, the image will fade away, but the sensation remains with those who stay, waiting for new departures.
VDB23 is a psychedelic explosion in the soul.
Rigel is Claudio's Star, vdB23 is Marok's Nebula. Rigel and vdB23 meet in the cosmos thanks to Fabio Peri, and enjoying the astral silence, they scream. They scream above matter, plastic, tar, cement, the traffic of Rome, the atmosphere.
"As if the most welcoming room of thought were reserved for us, outside a black hole".
Under fading skies rise the chants of those born to the earth and explode psychedelically and sentimentally beyond life, a story that has just begun...
Heavy as silk. Because nothing has been lost.. In the middle age of confusion.
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- The Quality of Dance
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