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THE DISCIPLINE OF THINGS - Part 2: DOLGOPAX
"We are not like that. We want to live where an aroma can move us, a taste can overwhelm us. It is time for proposals, for visionary innovation." (Claudio Rocchi)
The Oltrarno is the secluded and dark side of the two banks.
Continuing from Via de' Bardi along the road that leads to Via San Niccolò, you arrive in front of Palazzo Vegni, the building where Andrei Tarkovsky lived during his years of leaving the USSR. Continuing on the same path and taking Via dell'Olmo, you can visit the shop of Anacleto Abraham, CLET. Physical places, but also of the mind.
Dolgoprudnyj is located in Russia, Moscow Oblast. Then there's Tallinn. Isfara is in Tajikistan. Dolgoprudnyj is also known as Dolgopa. Far beyond geography, these too can be places of the mind, as were Ulaanbaatar and the Gobi Desert. Not all music is produced and released for the same reasons. Some music is made for the body, while other music, the other, is nurtured for the mind. This is the case with Nothing Went Lost.
NEAP is the phonographic artifact on which part of the tour directed and produced by Gianni Maroccolo in 2016 is recorded, and released on March 4, 2017. On the cover, the vision the painter Claudio Capecchi dedicated to his friend Claudio Rocchi. The physical, handcrafted, and handmade production was handled by Florence's Bottega Contempo Records. The tour was entirely self-managed and self-produced by Maroccolo himself, with Enzo Onorato, with no managers or agents even considered. A tradition that refers to the history and method of the Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti. Farmhouses and gas stoves. Absolutely outside any pop or markedly commercial circuit, the austere Samizdat-like temper of a work almost clandestine. Rehearsals were conducted among the oaks of Carpineti in Reggio Emilia, on the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, and after about a month, the collective plan took shape, songs rise and the dance moves.
If in VDB23, the studio work from 2013, it was the electrical jolts of the day in the afternoons awaiting the evening, this live anthology is the intimate introspection of vespers. Nocturnal arrangements of a nocturnal animal, the substance of things is the silence of things. Candor, welcome, warmth, perhaps languor, but not swooning, indeed gentleness and commendable vulnerability that turns into power, into reflection, into a sort of discipline.
"Music is little related to reality. Even if it is connected, it is so without ideologies. Yet, as if by miracle, music penetrates the human soul. What resonates within us in response to noise elevated to harmony? How does it transform for us into the source of immense pleasure that unites and moves?" (Andrei Tarkovsky - STALKER - 1979)
NEAP is the fruit of Maroccolo gathered by an extraordinary musical Together along traces of sought-after and immaterial sounds that still manage not to lose the relationship with the earthly surroundings. Faithful to the multisolo nature of his personal works, Maroccolo is the Ensemble Director and Producer and adorns himself with a musical collectivity that is not a mere support band. Antonio Aiazzi, the maestro Beppe Brotto on sitar, esraj, guitars, mandolin, and bagpipes. Andrea Chimenti on vocals, electric piano, and acoustic deserves special mention. It is exceptional how the former Moda manages to enter with silky elegance and grace into the lyrical and vocal world of the voices he interprets throughout the program. A prodigious musical sensitivity, closer to the sound charm of Peter Murphy than the physicality of David Sylvian. A strong and graceful singer. Beneath it all is the essential and functional drumming of Simone Filippi (historic guitar of the Üstmamò) who also handles electronics, voice, and acoustic guitar, the discreet presence of this record.
In times of acute egocentrism, it is touching to see and hear how the musicians make themselves available to Marok, accompanying him on his intimate journey and how Maroccolo himself lends himself in turn to the service of music and the ensemble in evolutions whose musical and textual center is the organ of a virtuous polycentric process. Despite the joy of the performances, however, Maroccolo never forgets his introverted temperament.
"Rinascere Hugs Suite" spreads like a gothic tale in which light is glimpsed at the end. A long dramaturgy in which, in this live version, more rounded arrangement sections emerge compared to certain asperities of the original studio version, and for Maroccolo an unheard, almost-progressive room. A truly gothic nightmare is "Santissima dei Naufragati" by Capossela that brings to mind the atmospheres of Edgar Allan Poe's novel, followed by the equally tragic "Peste" and "Versante Est". Then there are the guests. Godano, Alessandra Celletti who lightly sonifies the "Opening" by Philip Glass. Enchanting is the delicate weave crafted by Ginevra Di Marco in "Elianto". Overwhelmed by electricity is instead "La Battaglia" conducted with Renzulli. An agitated and resounding version of "Aria di Rivoluzione" by Battiato gradually emerges, later calmed by the folk chants of "No Potho Reposare" by Salvatore Simi/Giuseppe Rachel (again a homage to Sardinia) and the accordion of "Maria Walewska", originally belonging to the theatrical catalog of Beau Geste in Transea. "LD7M" proceeds regally and then unburdens to the sky: "This body must be left, I want to go out, to let myself finally go to the nature of the soul, light. I see a couple of lovers attracting me: they will think I'm a child". Acknowledgment is given to the influence of the Residents with the sublime funeral march of "My Window". A flash on the night is Chimenti's steinway lunaire of "Non Accenderti", a nocturnal song extracted from his solo repertoire - Yuri. "Nulla E' Andato Perso" closes with the recorded voice of Claudio who now finally floats light between Orion and the Pleiades.
NEAP is a necessary and unadorned record, raw, wholesome. It has a clean sound precisely because it’s dirty, pure. No overdubs, no corrections, no parts redone in studio, in this sense the detailed work carried out during the tour by another member of the Big Family, the sound engineer Vladimir Jagodic, is considerable. No self-glorification in this project where integrity is not for sale, not even if it doesn't work... not even if it doesn't work. Maroccolo is one who, when there was the chance for easy money, left, slamming the door. He is a river that flows towards the sea out of devotion for over thirty years and, above all, continues to make music. Modern, noisy, interesting. Today he is also in the Deproducers, yet another place, between Supernovae and the Svalbard Islands, where it takes off and the light reaches the boundaries of the known universe, our cosmic horizon in space and time.
NEAP has that kind of content to which the right time of fermentation must be dedicated.
It is an album to listen to slowly - Bolormaa, the straight path is for those in a hurry.
Two and a half hours of sounds that, like the inner time of durée, can seem like a moment or infinity. A metamorphosis in which to shatter and then transform suffering, anger, misery, nostalgia and allergy into beauty, into something sacred that defeats the degradation of certain days. It has an intimacy, an irreducible quality of Soviet mysticism. It should be listened to with the same spirituality and devotion with which people ideally listened to Linea Gotica or In Quiete: isolated farm in altitude, lights off and fire lit, silence inside and cold outside, soup always on the flame and warm bread, still red wine, and toasted tobacco, then in the end, still secularized liturgical silence and contemplation. Waiting for winter in autumn, on the top of a mountain or down in the depth of a sea.
"The empty morning returns, empty,
bright empty morning full
[...] and the emptiness is full, full
Lands beaten by winds incited by the mountains
serene enchantment shining with sun and white
dense shaded clouds of lead
gray-green of dense blue
Memories and steps of others whom I tread upon
over weariness of centuries, in alternating cadence
joy that reties grief that nails
joy that reties grief that nails
grief that nails, grief that nails."
These words, engraved on a rock, were written by Lindo Ferretti (CSI - Inquieto - 1994).
NEAP is resistant material faithful to the line, it is est/aesthetics, it is Rude Pravda.
It is an antidote that covers the weight of these distances. It is an ideal, an utopia, an illumination.
A dimension outside the spaces of despair because today is Sunday, tomorrow we die.
It is inner geography and related détournement.
Siberia, Pedra Mendalza, Elba, Finistère, Mostar, Växjö, and all the other where’s.
These places exist. The spirit reaches them. It frees itself from this space and this time.
"North, South, East, West. There is, according to an ancient saying from the East, a fifth cardinal point. The one where you are. Even we, like dust, continue to move. Perplexed most of the time. Even if now and then we seem to remember something about happiness."
(Gianni Celati/Davide Ferrario - On the 45th Parallel - 1997)
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