Mr. Bungle
Disco Volante

The praise of the absurd, the triumph of nonsense, twenty-five years after “Trout Mask Replica” the miracle repeats itself. If like me you discovered Mr. Bungle after falling madly in love with Faith No More, if you believed that “Angel Dust” was one of the most bizarre masterpieces of the early '90s, the best is yet to come for you. The side-project of the flamboyant singer Mike Patton was already noted from the 1991 self-titled debut as the rare beast of the decade. A gem for the few, niche, without commercial pretenses but with unbridled creative ambition. There are no radio singles, no lyrics with unequivocal or concrete meanings; it's a swirling abstraction with one goal: to showcase the extraordinary technical abilities of a diverse and colorful ensemble, channeling them into a tangy concentrate of pure artistic creation. Everything that can be experimented with and combined serves as a stimulus for incredible musical results that, unfortunately, cannot be adequately described in words.

“Disco Volante” (1995) lucidly focuses the insights of the first work to create what remains their most kaleidoscopic, aware, surely ingenious piece to date. It’s an overwhelming sonic experience for the listener, the seed planted by Lennon with “Revolution 9” has grown into an imposing tree with surreal titles instead of branches (to cite a few examples: “Chemical Marriage,” “Desert Search For Techno Allah,” “Phlegmatics”). It's a dark and self-assured game, where after the metal-gospel anthem “Everyone I Went To High School Is Dead,” we are tossed between mini-choirs à la Bacharach, psychedelic country, raucous swing, sound effects that, when listened to with headphones, deluge us, enveloping us like velvet thighs. Recordings of all kinds, surreal samples, but that's not all.

Mr. Bungle doesn’t just mix and reshape past genres in an original way; they stubbornly strive to create an entirely new music, an unprecedented wave of avant-garde, escaping all confinement-restrictions. Everything is allowed, but without the slightest smudge. Collective madness is harnessed yet anesthetized with great clarity of intent. And so, an unclassifiable jewel like the dramatic operetta entirely in Italian, “Violenza Domestica,” eloquently opened by the sound of someone sharpening knives, becomes possible. Mike Patton fits perfectly and with a purposely tragicomic effect into the role of a rogue from southern Italy, in a cinematic crescendo of despair, pathos, tango, and mambo with ridiculous exclamations like the final “La tua lingua è miaaaa!”. “After School Special,” on the other hand, is the perfect lullaby for the children of the future, profound and melodic but tinged with illness and layers of industrial smoke. A treat will be discovering the three-movement suite “The Bends,” where everything intersects, from John Zorn to silent cinema, from Ennio Morricone to Zappa. In almost seventy minutes, the main feelings you will experience are astonishment, amusement, admiration; you'll feel like a child brought for the first time to see Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” in the cinema, or a youngster the first time he reads Allen Ginsberg's Kaddish. Trembling before the new. And breaking away from it, frightened and disturbed, or wanting more, in the most insane greed for beauty.