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Rating: Wednesday, September 23, 8:30 PM, here we are again in front of the entrance to the Teatro Alfieri, a day older, slightly worried about what's in store for us (indeed, the fear that sleep, amidst the comfortable coils of a theater seat and the dim light, will overtake us and prevail over our fragile consciences is strong).
Many faces seen the day before at the Current 93 performance appear a year older, even though it seems to me that there are fewer people overall: the bloated ones from the seventies have vanished, the goths remain stable, and the category of oddball semi-intellectual characters of advanced age is growing.
Stapleton is still present at his stand, trying to gather as much money as possible (and he'll make a fortune, given the difficult availability of many of his works).
The clock strikes ten, it's time to go back in. Let's muster our strength...
The Song of the Sharp Void
Act Two
Nurse with Wound & Blind Cave Salamander
Larsen and z'ev
Tonight, Turin's Larsen presents their new show “In V.tro,” born from a collaboration with z'ev, an American avant-gardist and theorist of esoteric music. These two entities join forces to put on a show full of improvisation, aimed at scoring images from Giuseppe Levi's documentary “The Glance through the Lens,” which is based on visual material from the 1930s, focusing on the study of cell cultures.
The first to take the stage is z'ev himself, delighting us with a captivating introduction of only percussion. It's Larsen's turn, creators of refined “experimental post-rock,” a real pick-me-up for our spirits exhausted from two days of travel (and tomorrow we're working, not sleeping!). Among esotericism, electronics, and psychedelia, the set of the Turin-based band flows beautifully, not surprising (because we're still talking about avant-garde for the poor), but pleasantly massaging the ears while images of “cell movements” frantically scroll in the background.
A demonstration of artistic maturity and great professionalism. Well done.
Break.
It's Mr. Stapleton's turn, slumping into a chair on the left side of the stage, clutching his electric guitar.
The task tonight is to resurrect the historic Nurse with Wound album “Soliloquy for Lilith,” from 1988, performed live on stage for the first time. Assisting him are the Blind Cave Salamander, a project stemming from the minds of Paul Beauchamp (electronics, circular saw, harmonica) and Fabrizio Modenese Palumbo of Larsen (guitar and electric viola). Andrew Liles (who participated in the musical celebration of David Tibet the day before) will handle the synthesizers, while in the center stands the divine Julia Kent, with a beautiful cello between her legs.
So, explaining in words what will happen on stage over the next hour is difficult. Let's start by explaining that “Soliloquy for Lilith” is a horribly challenging album, perhaps the most enigmatic and impenetrable work in Stapleton's vast artistic production: it's a triple album (!!!), based on the repetition (and imperceptible variations) of the same theme, a breath of guitar that undulates into nothingness for about two and a half hours. We will, in a dedicated review, discuss it more thoroughly. What is important to understand is that all limitations to the enjoyment of such a work are greatly overcome by an arrangement that embellishes and even improves the studio work.
To clarify: the impression is like being in '73 attending a show by Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream: sacred and profane copulate humbly, aided by a respectable visual support. Behind the musicians, incomprehensible writings, esoteric symbols, fragments of figurative art, psychedelic images succeed each other. All very slowly, like the music, hypnotic, mysterious, hallucinogenic. The electronic landscapes are rounded out by Kent's providential cello, which draws concentric circles in the air that slowly envelop the mind of the audience immersed in the stupor. Stapleton doesn't seem to be doing anything, there in the corner making idiotic gestures with his guitar. Palumbo is busy, but even his writhing among various instruments seems quite imperceptible.
In reality, this sort of sonic monstrosity evolves, sinuously, elegantly, enriching itself step by step with new infinitesimal elements. What we are listening to is sophisticated music, pure avant-garde, an experience that is transcendental. I have the chance to grasp in its splendor the secular esotericism of Stapleton, a sound vivisectionist, a maniac of the detail, a patient sculptor of nuance, who finds and discovers in music, and more broadly in art, a medium to transcend the Real, not so much to touch the Divine, but to reach treasures buried in the unconscious.
Half the audience, mind you, is having a great sleep, full proof that you need balls to listen to certain music, not just wearing a Current 93 t-shirt and a pair of boots. For many, the art of the extreme is unfortunately just a pose; for others, it's a religion.
Undoubtedly among the best concerts of the year, on par with the sublime performance of Christian Fennesz, also a purveyor of great emotions in Florence last spring.
Off we go, let's leave, the road home is long, long enough to listen to all of “Soliloquy for Lilith” again during the journey, because if we're going to die, it's better to die sleeping and escape the pain...
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