Neronoia
Il Rumore delle Cose

Born from the meeting of minds between Canaan and Colloquio, the project Neronoia, after piquing public and critical interest with their subtle debut "Un Mondo in Me" from 2006, arrives in this suffocating 2008 with its second act.

 "Il Rumore delle Cose" confirms the good premises laid by its gloomy predecessor, surpassing it in compactness and meticulousness, perhaps losing something in terms of spontaneity and immediacy.
It's difficult to define the contents of the volume in question: Neronoia's music, outside of any standard classification, stands at the center of a pentagon with ambient, dark-wave, doom, post-rock, industrial at its vertices. Music that undoubtedly does not betray what is evoked by their eloquent name.

 A sort of Sigur Ros of darkness, Neronoia imposes itself on our ears with muted sounds, torn by the exhausted steps of a distant drum and the insidious harshness of icy synths called to weave existential voids worthy of the name.
The listening is nevertheless smooth, mainly thanks to the duration of the songs (all rather short, generally ranging between three and five minutes) and the Italian lyrics, which help maintain attention during the listening.
From "XI" to "XX" (the tracks are simply titled with numbers and the numbering resumes exactly where it ended in "Un mondo in me") sounds and moods change very little or not at all. Gianni Pedretti's minimalist lyrics, although far from brilliant, aptly sketch the existential void intended for expression since the band's name: a weariness devoid of color and pain and rage and despair, but aimed at supporting on a pedestal of mud and dust an emptiness of hope and content, a weight on the neck and the soul, a dragging forward without any direction, letting oneself live day by day, minute by minute, moment by moment, until the end (if indeed an end is granted to us).

 The hardships and disorientation of a life more squalid than cruel, endured in every single fragment (both physical and emotional); the exacerbation of the currently lived moment drowned in the resignation of the following moment: all this does not materialize in noteworthy lyrical surges but in a blurred contemplation of being that snakes through the humps of boredom even before real pain. Perhaps because feeling pain is nonetheless a signal of life, an active mode of being.

 "I try to provide support, to my world, which lost in nothingness, standing alone, no longer knows how to stay. Nevertheless, I try, to seek, the strength to do, something, who knows" (XIII)

 "I remain alone, I am content, I don't move, I am happy" (XV)

 "I move forward, then I stop, I am tired, I am confused, I am born today, I do not remember, I move forward, then I return" (XVI)

 The afflictions and the hoarseness of Pedretti's recitations, his deep voice cynically enunciating simple and suspended phrases in the void, often repeated to exhaustion, dark nursery rhymes devoid of poetry and so abstract and intangible as to be applicable to any situation in life, are therefore not merely didactic ornaments but an indispensable component of a reasoned and meticulously crafted music: two elements (the lyrical and the musical) that support and endure each other, proceeding hand in hand, one the crutch of the other, limping and secreting an existential songwriting that chooses as its sonic backdrop the slow pulse of a dark ambient, often enlivened by airy guitars (often in delay) balancing between 80s dark and post-rock evolutions typical of our times.

 Acclaimed (perhaps excessively) by the national press, Neronoia and "Il Rumore delle Cose" remain a significant reality in the panorama of today's tricolor dark music (probably the most worthy heirs of the defunct Monumentum): the vivid (and unfortunately isolated) signal of an Italy fleeing from any attempt at emulation to slip into a finally original dimension: a possible fertile ground for followers who, who knows, might even sprout beyond the narrow national borders.

In the dark on this road, the boredom slips away...