Ottodix
Chimera

Enrolled within the orbit of a cross-expressive multimedia-multimodality spanning plastic art forms, writing, and light music, the Ottodix project by the versatile artist, musician, and singer Alessandro Zannier is finally establishing itself as one of the brightest segments of the pop skyline of Italy.
Glocal effect: on one hand, there's the clear organic inscription in the electro-new wave-post-punk scene surrounding the Veneto capital from the '70s to the 2000s (from pioneers like Treviso.Underground, Domus Tedi, Scent Merci, up to Templebeat); on the other hand, the choice of singing in the mother tongue has allowed the trio to re-position their proposal in the broader context of the made-in-Italy song, projecting its usability to the limit of national boundaries.

Ottodix, however, constitutes an almost-midstream unicum: since their beginnings, they attempted an original reworking of electropop sounds grafted onto the primal new wave trunk, moving within a stylistic perimeter defined by Bowie, Bjork, Massive Attack.

Contemporaries (but not influenced by) much better-known bands like Bluvertigo and SubsOnicA, Ottodix writes here a decisive chapter in their journey.
Produced by Discipline of Garbo and Luca Urbani (Soerba, Deleyva, Zerouno, Fluon…), the album in question reaffirms the thematic framing attitude in a concept key within their latest works: as already happened with "Le Notti di Oz" (2009) and "Robosapiens" (2011), in this fifth album, the conceptual framework is fluidly centered on the failure of 20th-century utopias,
where sinister premonitions of post-apocalyptic scenarios accompany its parabolic implosion, but in an intertwined manner, also shifted to the inevitable fascination for the same unrealizable utopian entities, hybrid as they are animated by multicentric identities by definition: this is the thematic epicenter of "Chimera".
From here, the musical narrative unfolds in sequential panels where literary and historiographic citations outline the very dense poetic figure of the album: from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 ("Apocalisse") to the physicist and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla ("Gli Archivi di Tesla"),
to the more transparent utopian dreams of "Napoleone" and Cervantes's "Mulini a Vento".
Echoes of Martin Gore in heartfelt soul declination can be found in Alessandro Zannier's seductive singing that theatricalizes the narratological conceptuality
of the thematic path of "Chimera", meeting the rhythmic-symphonic blocks created by Mauro Franceschini's percussion and Antonio Massari's guitar touches.

A structurally recognizable Depeche Mode pattern but now forced into more narrow and syncopated scenarios ("Chimera Meccanica a Vapore", "Ucronìa"), now expanded into broader horizons, disturbed by eerie industrial clangors à la Einsturzende Neubauten and NIN: the aforementioned instrumental track
"Gli Archivi di Tesla", but also the splendidly lyrical "L'Ultima Chiesa", where Baustelle-like melodic volutes merge with
almost sinisterly automatic cold percussive touches, giving life to one of the most intense (and chimerically "hybrid") jewels of the entire collection.
The other is surely the bare, dreamlike, and subtly unsettling "Le Città Immaginarie", which reveals at the end of the album the intimate singer-songwriter matrix of Ottodix's compositional style: a sophisticated and erudite song form that is from time to time cloaked in layers of synth-pop and new wave with echoes of Ultravox and Japan, when the unattainable icon David Bowie isn't even evoked.
The Utopias, in their tragic massified realization, are (through the 15 fluid moments of the album) subverted precisely in unveiling their dark historiographic baselessness,
leaving, however, a disturbing void that after the dramatic isms of History yields the scene to what will come later, by contrast, and yet more pointlessly celebrative of the umpteenth already seen: "Post", the lead single, is the most powerfully evocative piece of the historicizing awareness of the entire operation, and also the clearest key to reading this project: very ambitious, and successful.