Kirlian Camera
Still Air [Aria Immobile]

The late nineties were certainly not a pleasant time for Angelo Bergamini, who was busy defending himself against accusations of Nazism from the high pulpit of sociologist Alfred Shobert: during those years, he faced the break with the historic label Discordia, the cracking of an increasingly fragile and less cohesive lineup, and a fleeting inspiration that came and went, not always aligning with the band's renowned reputation.

It's the year 2000, “Still Air [Aria Immobile]” is released: Kirlian Camera enters the new millennium with one of their darkest works, if not the darkest, a shadowy outcome of a dark phase the Parma ensemble went through in the preceding years. The chilling opening requiem, “The Unreachable One”, provides the darkest testimony: eight minutes for three notes repeating with a funereal, hypnotic step, slashed by the oblique cuts of icy electronics, crossed by ghostly voices, miasmas of dead machines floating in the air, like disturbed frequencies captured by the monumental antenna featured on the striking black and white cover.

The lineup essentially stabilizes into a duo, with the indestructible Bergamini maneuvering between synthesizers and electronic wizardry, assisted by the seductive singer and composer Elena Fossi, who debuted the previous year in the well-received “Unidentified Light”. Elena Fossi does not make us miss the historic muse Emilia Lo Iacono, whose voice still appears in a couple of tracks: how can we not mention the splendid “Absentee”, a renowned classic of the band, a kind of intergalactic electro-country that represents the project's more folk-oriented side. In “Unaufmerksame Leute” (the other track featuring Lo Iacono’s vocals, a song that seems birthed from the minds of four Kraftwerk cadavers frozen and trapped in a spaceship lost in infinite space), the curly-haired singer prefers to weave afar the terrible recitations of Bergamini, whose voice, inevitably effected, emerges here colder and more robotic than ever. It is precisely this arid and lifeless rasp that carves out several important moments throughout the work, including the jazzy “The Hidden Voice”, a rough and harsh passage in the style of Nine Inch Nails, evoking the harsher past of the Emilia-based formation.

While Lo Iacono, with a vivid and unique personality, sweet yet clumsy, had helped forge the mature sound of KC, Fossi, far more skilled and measured in her vocalizations, blends perfectly into the track left behind by the band in the previous decade: her vigorous and crystalline timbre flows in miraculous symbiosis with the complex geometries outlined by Bergamini's electronic genius, increasingly settled on an elegant cosmic industrial not devoid of ambient temptations (the impalpable “Uninhabited”), subtle electro-pop/EBM melancholies (the catchy “At any Moment Now”) and gloomy explorations with an unhealthy martial-esoteric pace (the lullaby “Black Harbour/Helma Nah' Shmarr”).

It is not a coincidence that in “Heaven's Darkest Shore 1”, KC opens the doors of their world to the entity Sixth Comm, hosting the percussions, electronic manipulations, and Gregorian chants of that legend of ritual-industrial music, Patrick Leagas: this piece, a desolate fresco of pulsating occult energies, emerges forcefully from the album’s uniform flow, aided by a jungle explosion at the finale (impossible not to think of the Propellerheads’ “History Teaching”): a jolt of life that finally animates a work that might have been meticulously designed as a single suite traversed by the mournful beating of a mechanical heart destined for eternal rust. The subsequent, distressing, endless “Anti-light” unsurprisingly brings us back into the ranks of one of the most glacial and resigned moods produced by KC in their long and fruitful career.

In its collapse and self-folding, then expanding into cosmic images tending towards a coldly conceived and developed Nothingness, “Still Air” is also an album that sows the seeds of rebirth, if not artistic, at least emotional, for a fundamental reality in our dark scene: more cohesive and focused on their intents, Bergamini and Fossi cement their pact and consolidate their strengths to continue their dark path, leading them a few years later to another major work of the new decade, “Invisible Front 2005,” which will (almost) restore Kirlian Camera to the great heights of their glorious past.

Almost...