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This happens.
From the ashes of Quelli ("c'è una bambolina che fa no no no"), PFM is born. Franco Mussida (guitar, vocals), Flavio Premoli (keyboards, vocals), Mauro Pagani (played a bit of everything), Giorgio Piazza (bass), Franz Di Cioccio (drums, vocals). Like Pink Floyd, there is no vocal leader. But they look to prog, particularly to King Crimson.
September, 1970. Milan. Corvetto area, south. In a former parish cinema adapted for the purpose as a recording studio, Battisti, with Mogol as the great supervisor and Reverberi as the orchestra master, records "Emozioni". Mussida, Di Cioccio, and Premoli are also playing. The song, beautiful, is an explosion of meditation and nature, of herons above the river and morning heathlands. What brilliant Mussida and Premoli, asserts Battisti. Indeed, responds Mogol.
In 1971, the most famous duo in Italian song founded their own label, Numero Uno. So, let's bring these guys, with Pagani and Piazza joining in the meantime, to play with us. Moreover, it was the golden age of prog, between King Crimson, Genesis, and Jethro Tull you had plenty of records to sell. It was the most loved genre, along with rock and pop. Indeed, in 1972, the Prog Festival was held in Villa Pamphili, and everyone went: Van Der Graaf Generator, Peter Hammill, Hawkwind, and the Italians Osanna, New Trolls, and PFM.
But in 1972 their first album, "Storia di un minuto", was also released, and those bucolic Mogol-like images from "Emozioni" are also found in the leading track of the album, "Impressioni di settembre", written by Mogol, indeed. Certainly, the famous moog solved many doubts for PFM, but their changes in rhythm, the ups and downs, the atmosphere that turns into sarabandes ("E' festa") or gothic ("La carrozza di Hans", another masterpiece) are all PFM Style.
The album is one of the most beautiful of Italian music, perhaps even more, in my opinion, than the subsequent live in the USA (Italian band that garners followers abroad, and today we have to put up with Maneskin!), because it's an album that contains them all. Just think of the two-act suite "Dove... quando" that closes the first side and opens the second, with a dreamlike, almost hypnotic rhythm that opens up to the darkness of Hans the merchant. Which came to Mussida's mind:
"One night, as we were returning to Milan after an evening in Turin, I was driving our van and focusing on a melody I had in mind. I hummed it to myself, imagined the development, the openings, the time changes. I was in a hurry to get home as quickly as possible to jot down those notes on the guitar".
A worthy conclusion with "Grazie davvero", which is a celebration of accelerations and decelerations, with a brass section in great form. Even though, perhaps, it’s the weakest piece of the whole album, not to say superfluous, of course not, but, in my opinion, the least focused.
That said, great work. And congratulations to Numero Uno (whose press office manager was Mara Maionchi) which over the years has managed to produce artists of exceptional level (a name? Ivan Graziani).
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