Ianva
L'Occidente

THE REVIEW

'oh unfortunate generation you will cry, but with lifeless tears because perhaps you will not even know how to return to what not having had you have not even lost'

Pier Paolo Pasolini

It is with great pleasure that I proceed to jot down a few lines on the third work by the Italians Ianva, about whom I have already spoken on these same electronic pages on the occasion of their first full-length album "Disobbedisco!". This little bouquet of refined beauty is composed of four formidable compositions, not at all brief (an average of about 6 minutes per track), and magnificently over-arranged, just as many of us expected, weary of the now superficial minimalism at-all-costs. The cauldron is rich, wisely mixed by the musical arts of the obviously Genoese ensemble, made even more abundant this time by the experience of new musicians and new inspirations, whose alchemical product has been left for a good two years to mature and age, like good Italian things. Malombra and Morricone, Martinetti and De Martino, nods not new to Brel and Walker and De André, Douglas Pearce and Anna/Varney, a certain taste for the low and 'crawling' tones of certain early doom or 'dark' prog, and then Folk Noir and cabaret, Rota-like 'Amarcord' and band music suggestions, Italian, French, German and even English, as demonstrated by the tribute to the beautiful ballad 'In Battaglia' (forgive me the bold alliteration): everything blends and confounds in the search for colors and atmospheres that only at the cost of a grave simplification would be defined as 'vintage'. The timeless grace and caressing melodies of 'Il Sereno e la Tempesta' are of musical anthology, as is the poignant 'Santa Luce dei Macelli', which evokes the traditions (and not a meta-historical 'Tradition', false and contrived, with all due respect to you-know-who) of our most genuine and neglected South, pregnant with a spirituality and a harsh sensual musicality much vilified by the Enlightenment legacy, and of which, allow me the apparently out-of-place digression, the so-called Human Sciences have finally done justice. And then describe the new performances of Mercy (Il Segno del Comando, Malombra) and Stefania D'Alterio (Wagooba)! The former alternately hieratic and military, always composed and icy in bearing, the latter pathetic, visceral (rightly notes friend Gianni) and iron-like, like the Lucanian mourning woman or the janara of Matese.

Equally unique are the instrumental contributions of the entire ensemble, partly revisited specifically for this EP and never out of place or over-the-top, always significant. Only two notes of regret, in my view, namely the production sometimes a little 'muddy', particularly concerning Mercy's voice in rare passages, and the absence of Argento (Spite Extreme Wing), already missing on the occasion of last year’s 'Vesper Ianvense'. A new little gem, then, that once again scornfully crushes with the power of its themes, its fullness, and beauty, the easy simplifications and mystifications. New dolorous notes, cruel and never as vivid and cutting as the fears and pains in the trench; true as our bitter disappointment, as the disillusionment from Arditism, even if filtered through the mist of nostalgia. If it is true, as a great anthropologist and linguist said, that men speak only and always about the human condition, even when they do not realize it or only unconsciously, well here we probably have an exact, conscious, and evident example of what he meant, and on several levels to boot. The lyrics allow indeed a double reading: the immediate, instinctive one, I would say, typical of the lyrics of the 'song form', a semantic dimension perhaps closer to poetry, and instead, hidden, the critical and historical sense, perhaps even ideological and certainly philosophical. We wonder, provoked by listening to the first track ('L'Occidente', indeed), what remains of this our 'West'. Is this the heritage for which our ancestors fought and died? Have we truly bartered their sacrifice for a soft and myopic well-being? Some nevertheless remain awake and farsighted, even if only to helplessly observe the coming of the 'night', where the Sun declines, in the west. With fictitious solutions of continuity to feel 'us' from 'them', we turn scornfully and proudly our backs to the brothers of the deserts and steppes, only to look around and discover ruins, look within and discover the empty abysses of nothingness (Cioran and Caraco?), to finally return to being 'a cardinal point'.

And so perhaps there is nothing left but to march backward, retreat towards the 'P'ast, (re)search the Lost Time, idealize it and make it an anchor of salvation, even if it will not return.

Alessandro Testa 'EthosAnthropoDaimon'