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Rating: When approaching a dog, there is always a doubt: will it start barking, fiercely, or will it succumb to our hypocritical caresses?
Now, we are the dog, Jacopo Incani (known to homemakers as Iosonouncane) is the passerby eager to excite the creature. Like all beasts, we react irrationally, due to an animal instinct or the unpleasant or pleasant scent that our nose catches in the air. Enclosed within the hair of a dog, I reacted according to my instinctual subjectivity in a positive way to the debut of this artist.
The characters in this scene are a former call center employee (our hero), a loop machine, a sampler, and some fragments of acoustic guitar. The rhythms are cauterizing, pieces of metal that burn and disinfect, disenchanted with violence because they are reduced to a primitive and brutally repetitive substance that provides a skeletal framework for a succession of creaking and piercing sounds.
The whole is perfectly blended by a voice that is anything but sweet and melodic, also shrill and violent, vomiting sounds materialized in an epileptic carousel of harsh and hallucinated lyrics, highly deformative and reflecting in a disjointed manner an Italian reality, cracked and perforated with deep fissures, leaving crusts under which the verminous rot of death proliferates.
I experienced this during my unspecified first sexual approach with the record, the moment when, without paying attention to the internal division of the tracks, you gulp it down like a LIDL alcohol until the bottle is empty, and the infernal tumult of the cheap liquor provokes cries of revenge from the stomach.
An impression, you might say, of nausea. Right.
But it is a desired sensation, which, strangely, I had been unconsciously seeking for a long time. If we want, the transposition of subconscious impressions from Pomeriggio sul 2, that state of mind staggering drunkenly between the brutal need to dismember commentators and mannequins, to violently tear apart pieces of human beings who are no longer such, and that desperate pity, that need to empathize with shadows destined to fade away, forgotten, upon the next ignition of the spotlights.
It sculpts in dark, black clay the portrait of a nation in free fall, where cloth puppets move with frenzy, rushing to reach the next talk show, the stadium match, a crowded beach.
The exhilarating debut is a disjointed parade of pieces of flesh that the wheezing sun cuts out on the sand of the beach, drenched in sweat and sunscreen. You can feel the smell of skin burned by sunbeds, the melted plastic of career-oriented blond forty-year-olds, and the scent of immigrant corpses decomposing on the beach; underneath, the relentless pulse transforms the alienating rhythm into an epic march towards universal collapse (Summer on a crowded beach).
The work continues in these tones, proceeding with a hallucinatory look, schizophrenic, accompanied by a voice oscillating between the cynicism of the disillusioned moralist and closed despair, the awareness of the impossibility of surviving within the oil-plastered walls of a fast-food joint.
Heart-wrenching moments, irradiated by a guitar singing funeral ballads, epitaphs for stray dogs left under the crushing rotation of tires on a provincial road. Moments of complete alienation, uprooting, isolation, sounds from an assembly line and metalworking factory, echoing among the infinite distances of a call center cubicle.
And towards the end, group dances, conga lines of fat men and grotesque circus promoters, old women caressed by silicone, virgin prostitutes, walking in compact columns through the streets and cities, preparing, famished for muscle fibers, for the final joyful ordeal.
*** *** ***
After finishing listening, I review and, on the verge of placing a 4/5, I make the mistake, which I often avoid, of understanding who exactly is the conductor of this irreverent show. I watch an interview, perhaps the only one available, from which I exit in few letters: disappointed. Someone might think I should go graze bananas for this unforgivable heresy.
Kierkegaard, it seems to me, said that true art can only arise from personal experience: that four-fifths rating had been inspired in me by a mental image of the man behind the instrument, a societal confined, oscillating between self-destructive passivity and a bitter lucidity towards reality, which I felt empathically close. Much of my admiration was the result of a conviction: that Jacopo Incani was a common mortal, bound to me, to us, by a solidary brotherhood in despair. And in his similarity to me, he knew how to move me.
Instead, the interview revealed what I didn’t want revealed: the haughty attitude, the flaunted superiority, the pose of a snobbish artist, the commercialized genius stuffed with dramatic metaphors. Something completely different from the sincere simplicity of a Vasco Brondi, who doesn't hide his common person, his being a man before a musical demigod.
And then the touching despair of the cry was imperceptibly stained, lost its primal charge, and, illuminated from a different perspective, took on the traits of a mask, used to partially conceal the presumptuousness typical of a self-absorbed intellectual.
But, in the end, this is my opinion, and subjective is the appreciation that, all things considered, I feel towards this record. For many others, it will appear unlistenable, brutal, scraping in its sounds;
But, if from the excerpt I've tried to give you, it seems that you're ready for something like this, dive into listening to it, because you might miss something that is abnormally and grandiosely deformed.
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