Lucio Battisti
L'apparenza

The appearance presents itself as the ideal continuation of the musical ideas sketched in "E già" and then developed in "Don Giovanni"; the whole is more compact and homogeneous, creating a work that is definitely more muted and impermeable compared to its predecessors.

The presence of electronic instruments alongside orchestral elements seems more mature, thanks to the excellent production work by Robyn Smith who manages to enrich the sound fabric of the tracks with almost subliminal details, and in particular, to give the rhythmic elaborations reverberations and acoustic refinements appreciable especially after numerous listens.
The structure of the tracks, unpredictable and now far removed from the traditional song format, accommodates often elusive melodic cues and seems to reveal a significant inversion of the compositional process, which this time presents the lyrics of Pasquale Panella as the foundation on which the "soundtrack" was subsequently built.
The fiery irony and winks at the listener from "Don Giovanni" have disappeared; the music, rarefied and almost ethereal, seems an impenetrable shield at first listens while the fluid poetic matter of Pasquale Panella illustrates with increasingly elusive texts intricate images that seem conceived in a state of semi-consciousness.

It is useless to search for a hidden meaning "beneath" the word because it is already present on its surface; the appearance of the word, in its ambiguity, is already laden with all possible meanings which will be revealed to the listener differently each time, according to their predisposition to listening, to the association of ideas, to the connection of always renewable and interchangeable correspondences.
A word that becomes ambiguity, that conveys a multiplicity of meanings including those evoked by the pure musicality of the text, rejecting any further explanation, any translation, any reduction; consistent with this obscure poetic, the texts are absent in the packaging, and the covers of the CD and cassette editions contain only part of the design (a belief...).

"Everything is linguistic and therefore everything speaks"; finally, words and music can free themselves from the obscenity of having to be necessarily (and basely) univocal and clear, of having to exercise the bad faith of communication.