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Rating: Listening to Flipper is like stepping into a dream where the entire history of music overwhelms you all at once. This is not an album to listen to distractedly: it is a place to stay, a labyrinth where past, present, and memory overlap. Claudio Milano’s voice is the pulsing center, but he doesn't sing in the classical sense: it evaporates, distorts, multiplies, passes through you and forces you to stay awake. In those moments, you can’t help but think of Demetrio Stratos and his Evaporazione, but also of Cathy Berberian, with her total freedom, her ability to transform voice into instrument, body, and madness all at once. Milano gathers this legacy and makes it his own, pushing it even further.
Luciano Berio (the album is released on the occasion of the centenary of his birth) is an invisible thread that runs through the entire album. The never-before-heard aria Quando ricordiamo (Berio/Calvino) on CD is a cornerstone, but the echo of his Folk Songs breathes in every fragment: the idea of distorting, overlapping, contaminating eras and styles guides the whole work. Milano takes Monteverdi, Purcell, Fauré, the jazz of Summertime, Black Is the Color, and Bruno Martino’s Estate and makes them run, disappear and reappear like distorted memories, blending personal life and collective history in a medley that sometimes feels like a musical stream of consciousness.
There are also moments when the shadow of Area powerfully emerges: those sudden fragments, anarchic and anarchizing, remind you that music can still be wild, political, and free. borda’s electronics don’t just accompany, they challenge, disorient, create unstable bridges between past and future. Fear is everywhere, but it’s not spectacular: it’s subtle, pervasive, structural. It is the fear of a history slipping through your fingers, of a world you cannot control, and yet Milano confronts it by singing, transforming fear into creative energy.
Flipper is not an album that ends when you turn it off. It gets under your skin, leaving you with the feeling you have walked through decades of music and history in a hundred minutes. It’s an experience of coexistence: eras, voices, styles, memories contaminate each other without ever losing their identity, and it is precisely in this controlled chaos that a rare and essential intensity emerges.
In the end, when the album closes, what remains is Milano’s voice evaporating, Stratos and Berberian whispering to you from the shadows, Berio’s echo accompanying you, and the awareness that music, even today, can still be radical, necessary, and profoundly alive.
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