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Rating: Il Ciclo di Bethe – Barbaric Age: Memories, Roots and Steel
When memory becomes sonic resistance
While many wonder about the rumored reunion of CSI—a collective dream that for years has fueled the nostalgia of an entire generation—there is a band in Italy that has taken up their most authentic spirit. Not by imitation, but through ethical, aesthetic, and visual affinity: Il Ciclo di Bethe.
A project that, while proudly remaining at the fringes of the market and promotional logics, may well represent the most direct and coherent emanation of that tradition of militant and poetic music linking Teste Vuote, CCCP, and CSI.
With “Barbaric Age: Memories, Roots and Steel”, and especially with the first volume “Memories”, the collective led by Alexandro Sabetti confirms what was already apparent after Novecento: we are witnessing one of the most intense, courageous, and creatively vibrant Italian bands in the contemporary scene.
And Sabetti, already among the founders of the primordial Argine, reaffirms himself as one of the best Italian songwriters—complex, visionary, undervalued by a stifling music landscape, but fortunately still free to speak to true enthusiasts, to those who seek Songs with a capital S.
A permanent musical revolution
“We are not releasing an album. We are opening a front.”
The group’s manifesto phrase perfectly synthesizes the nature of Barbaric Age: not a traditional record, but a three-act project unfolding over an entire year—an evolving work intertwining memory, identity, and resistance.
The first chapter, “Memories”, gathers five unreleased tracks and two bonus tracks, for a total of nearly forty-five minutes of sound, lyrics, and visions in constant dialogue between past and present.
The opening, “Nazione” — produced by Cristiano Santini (Disciplinatha, Dish Is Nein) and Riccardo Sabetti (This Eternal Decay) — is a punch in the stomach: a wall of sound where electronics, techno, and punk coexist in a collective, ruthless, and clearheaded ritual, playing with reactionary slogans to generate paradoxes, ridiculing the present while also reclaiming a lost otherness..
Next is “Cronacart”, with the warm, magnetic voice of Andrea Chimenti, turning memory into a secular prayer. It’s a hypnotic and melancholic track, almost an electronic ballad that speaks of the past to address the present.
“NATO con le ore contate”, performed by Massimo Baiocco, instead moves between Brechtian theater and sound experimentation, in a dramatic and politically evocative crescendo. The play on words between Nato and N.A.T.O. is the heart of the track.
With “Mantra (L’imponderabile elemento della pecora)”, the band crafts a soundscape suspended between psychedelia and stoner, while “La verità” — featuring the tightrope-walking Andrea Ra on bass, in a duet with Trinity — is a surprising sonic construction that weaves a tangled dance groove with Ra’s funk/punk stride, culminating in krautrock electronics à la DAF. The truth the song refers to is the media snapshot of our times.
Memories and roots, between tributes and reinterpretations
The album closes with two tributes that embody the project’s roots:
“Die Beine von Dolores” by Pankow, recorded live at Circolo Arci Ribalta in Vignola, a stronghold of Italian counterculture, and “Xaviera Hollander” by Diaframma, rearranged and reinterpreted with the voice of Riccardo Sabetti.
Two far from random choices: if Pankow incarnate the industrial and corrosive soul of the 1980s, Diaframma represent the most lyrical and decadent side of that same era.
Produced by Verso Productions in collaboration with Kulturjam Edizioni, Barbaric Age is an album that rejects neutrality. It is an aesthetic and political act, built upon a network of collaborations that restores a necessary sense of community to Italian independent music.
In an age of disposable music, Il Ciclo di Bethe instead proposes an idea of art as resistance, of song as a gesture of freedom.
Not a product, but a journey.
Not a return to the past, but a new avant-garde.
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