Iosonouncane
IRA

Dies IRAe

Sure, the previous review of this (double) album did not go unnoticed, and this new work by Iosonouncane/Jacopo Incani has already been much discussed (here and elsewhere), but since it's such a complex work, with many facets, it is right to keep talking about it. Now that, two weeks after its release, we are no longer in the heat of the moment, and the listens have accumulated and been digested enough to give a more serene judgment, free from opposing extremes, enthusiasm, or the rush to downplay. And, if the "cite this, remember that, the other came before" game is over, I propose my personal suggestion and interpretation, following the listens and some readings.

Reading an interview with Incani himself, a passage quotes his words about IRA:

"IRA is a frontier record, one of boundless and unknown landscapes crossed by a multitude whose lives and voices mix until they lose their contours. A hopeless record because it is set in a specific moment, in the vain attempt to stop one and infinite stories before they are completed. In light of this and the past year, it may probably sound like the final gasp of a world that will never be the same again. Or perhaps, the first cry of a world yet to be defined."

My mind constantly wanders and is always open to associations, artistic parallels, and intellectual/conceptual affinities.

Therefore, immediately I was reminded of Herzog's visionary masterpiece Heart of Glass (1976). These words from the opening scene, over which the notes of Popol Vuh play:

"My gaze goes beyond the horizon, to the ends of the world. The day is not yet over, but the end is here, before me.

Time begins to fall, and after time, the earth. Clouds gather, the ground boils. It is the sign: it is the beginning of the end. The extreme limit of the world begins to sink, everything sinks, always more. It overturns and falls. Falls, continues to fall.

And captured by this vortex, I watch. I feel a whirlpool envelop me, drag me, take me away.

I fall, slide lower and lower, it's the vertigo.

Yes, my gaze is now fixed on that waterfall. I am looking for a place, a refuge where my eyes can find peace. And I become light, increasingly light. My body dissolves into nothingness, like everything around me. I fly high.

And from this fall and from this flight, the first tremor of a new land.

In the waters, the memory of Atlantis.

I see a new land being born."

For me, it is not a blasphemous association; on the contrary. In this album, Iosonouncane, through the use of a transient and extemporaneous language, reflects on the multitude of modernity and on the concept, which he himself considers relative and "in motion," of cultural identity. It's indeed an apolide work; it certainly cannot be considered an "Italian" work. To consider it so would mean limiting its potential and boundaries.

Herzog, on the other hand, is an artist who for decades has been exploring the depths of every remote corner of earth and sea, the oldest or lost cultures, the most diverse languages, seeking and seeing distant worlds, traveling in search, in turn, of the multitude. A nomad of vision, a continuous experimenter of audiovisual languages.

Here, I now want to consider IRA as the ideal soundtrack of a post-apocalyptic film by Herzog. As the journey from an old world to a new world. Towards rebirth from ashes and ruins.

I therefore consider it a great work, to be listened to and evaluated without superficiality or in a cursory way, as one is now accustomed to do in the Spotify era. And perhaps letting oneself go to personal suggestions. After all, art is and must be an open door.