Le Stelle Di Mario Schifano
Dedicato A...

The cosmos couldn't bear it… and wept its tears copiously. Many of these fell in California, New York, Seattle, London… in that magical and unrepeatable year that must have been 1967.

Few, intense, and exceedingly bright, also fell near Rome, drenching Mario Schifano, painter, but also sculptor and poet of that artistic movement called pop-art (from which he always distanced himself). Enchanted by such beauty, he decided to form a musical group, to give a sonic shape to some of his visual setups, in which he was exploring all the possibilities of juxtapositions between just two colors. These “experiments” closely resemble those made by Warhol with the Velvet Underground in his Factory, but also what Pink Floyd, with their Light Shows, were developing during their long, lysergic sessions at the Ufo Club.

Sure, in Rome there wasn't the ferment of New York and London, nor did Schifano have Lou Reed and John Cale or Syd Barrett and Roger Waters at his disposal… but what he managed to evoke in Le Stelle has an incredibly higher and (allow me the term) noble value than the undisputed masterpieces of the two most famous “rivals”. “Dedicato A…” is, from a musical standpoint, a crucial junction for all European music. The work is divided into two separate and distinct parts. Side A of the vinyl (unfortunately originally pressed in only 1000 copies, with the first 250 or so being red in color) contains the sole composition “Le Ultime Parole Di Brandimante, Dall’Orlando Furioso, Ospite Peter Hartman E Fine (Da Ascoltarsi Con Tv Accesa, Senza Volume)”, an anarchic suite of nearly 18 minutes, which owes much more to Cage and medieval music than to the best rock works produced up to that point; from which it actually seems to want to distance itself, so as to be able to freely shatter and expand the canonical form and substance of the song. An embryonic experimentation, which turns out to be a forward glance at the major rock avant-gardes of the years to follow, predicting the Anglo-Saxon psychedelic research, Italian progressive music, or the cosmic German expansion.

“Bradimante” evokes ancestral visions and omens of a dark future, where extracts of advertising jingles dissolve into a madrigal, marred by the razor-sharp strings of an extremely acid guitar. Human voices and transistor noises chase each other in a spatial ocean at the edge of a dark era, where even the torn soul of the Delta blues attempts a difficult reunion with African tribal rhythms… a land from which it was wrenched away in the name of God and slavery. On the more “normal” side B Le Stelle Di Mario Schifano, Nello Marini (organ and piano), Urbano Orlandi (guitar), Giandomenico Crescentini (bass) and Sergio Cerra (drums), create a small lysergic masterpiece divided into 5 tracks that wander far and wide through the kaleidoscopic spectrum of the best psychedelia. “Molto Alto” is a concentrate of Velvet Underground, Neu!, Silver Apples, and Suicide… while “Susan Song” is a sublime exercise in Italian songwriting executed with the ethereal melancholy of Nick Drake, conversing with the more gentle and calm side of early Van Der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill. “E Dopo” merges vaudeville with an acid blues, featuring a Hendrixian guitar intent on silencing a tense and anguished singing, almost a Demetrio Stratos interpretation echoing Battisti-Mogol, before the freakedelia of “Intervallo”, where rock’n’roll is not yet garage and the beat takes on Zappa-esque connotations, as wild laughter and jibing voices fill the background.

The concluding “Molto Lontano (A Colori)” reassuringly closes this invaluable work, with a pan flute interweaving a discourse woven by velvet hands, amidst the dissonant New York rhythms and the liquid visions of the best Californian minds. Chilling. But as mentioned, Rome isn't New York or London, so Le Stelle find themselves falling in the brief span of a season, with a single and this authentic masterpiece to their name, confirming how good the air was in that magical year of 1967. A must-have.

P.S. – a heartfelt and obligatory thanks to Akarma Records for reissuing “Dedicato A…” in 1999, on CD, black vinyl, colored red vinyl, and picture disc. So seek it out and buy it.