Lucio Battisti
E già

1982, what a year guys! Italy wins the World Cup, I'm 14, starting high school in September, on vacation, reciprocated, I fall madly in love with a friend's sister, but then I return to Rome and we part ways, my father will live for another year, "Clandestine Anticipation" by Krisma comes out, this comes out, here we are...

I find an almost identical analogy with Fellini's work; here Lucio purifies the reflection of Battisti (see internal cover) and recovers purity as Federico did with Casanova. Personally, like with the Beatles, I've always found Battisti indigestible, forced and artificial in situations (yes, Anima Latina is well done, it's a shame it winks from start to finish), but unlike with the cockroaches, where I can't find any meeting point, one day I start listening to this "E già" and "Con te non si sta male".

It is an invisible record that stands between Mogol and Panella, and its evanescence allows those two periods to exist in their self-deception. The exuberance of Mogol-Battisti with the sedimentation of Panella-Battisti, still ego thus. There is the emotional thought of the first, the rising sinusoid, and there is the intellectual thought of the second period, the conscious declining sinusoid. Mogol monetized sentiments materially, Panella probed them aesthetically, but always on an earthly balance.

But on this "E già" there is suspension, finally only Battisti swings into the nothingness of his upper dead point, into non-thinking, the unexpected. An entity that causes short circuits like all manifestations that do not require exchanges: the subtle exchange generates confusion, putting into crisis the coarse part of the aesthetics of each of us. We find ourselves "intelligently" naive, unacceptable...

The immediacy of the proposal touches the bliss of non-thinking; "when you are sitting, just sit!" suggests an "extreme" Eastern saying. And I recall Doctor Strange who in a comic book receives a little wooden box as a gift from the master, empty, and begins to subject it to increasingly sophisticated spells to try to discover the mystery hiding behind the object. Failing to extract any arcane information from his magical manipulations, he loses patience and smashes the box to the ground, breaking it. A moment later he understands: it was a gift, nothing but a gift, clear, crystalline, simple, because the truth is simple and does not nourish misleading possessions.

And that's what I feel when I listen to this record, a serene immediacy that shares without oppositions in offering Battisti's intimacy, without the filters of consideration that could be heard in other pre and post records, indeed. Here there is liberation from vanity, a mature relaxation, cleansing our selfish egoism of wanting expectations to be met. It takes something extra from us to be able to access a level of understanding veiled in normality.

"A minor work, but what have you done Lucio, this is a misstep, I don't recognize you, a disappointment": as soon as something hints at impersonality, it triggers considerations of rejection, "you will deny me three times..." What the heck?!? What a conquest to trigger misunderstandings, what courage to embrace a communicative register that does not reflect. There is a leap here and those who jump continue to speak to you from the upper plane of the cone, but you want to remain chained to the tangible. "Your mind and your thoughts will grasp and cling to the last illusions, in order to save your vision of the world. It will accept nothing, least of all a truth deemed offensive." That's why the true Battisti is rejected, "Take it as it is" one might say...

Through a psychic electrowave, the words blend with the outside creating an immediate bond, and the graphics are no less with that white dress in the dream that Lucio wanted us to share with him: the mirror, the reflection, the glimmer. And the words of the songs, so disparaged and dismissed as trivialities, transform into a crystalline esoteric journey where the playing field is the impersonal and the currency of exchange is the soul.

Let's try to give a key by doing a transversal track by track: in "Scrivi il tuo nome" there is the invitation to go beyond appearances, in "Mistero" the alchemical marriage, "Windsurf" is the astral journey, "Rilassati e ascolta" is awareness of change, "Non sei più solo" catharsis, "Straniero" the farewell to the old dimension, "Registrazione" is the acquisition of unity, "La tua felicità" is knowing yourself, "Hi-Fi" visualizes the invisible and "Slow motion" mystifies it, "Una montagna" the end of duality, "E già" clears the illusion. Here the flow floats pristine over exquisite electronic bases, so mature in their immediacy, in 1982...

Baked and eaten the ungraspable is served and we didn't realize it, patience, sooner or later it will settle. Buddha laughs and seems a fool under the lens of identification; we tear the veil and laugh like fools along with Lucio. The question spontaneously arises: "I wonder if it's rock or not..."