Rodan
Rusty

At that time, the man from the underground confined in the basement of "Spiderland" opened the door. He opened the door, climbed the stairs, went out of the house, and saw the light again. He saw the light again, dealt with the things of the world, and suddenly stopped. He suddenly stopped, looked inside himself, and discovered he was "Rusty."

Truly I tell you: the moment and place where we express a certain feeling radically change its characteristics. This is true for everyone, even for the borderline.

What was the origin of the alienated soliloquy of "Spiderland"? Why that rarefied intimacy hanging on the threads of undone arpeggios? And those sudden electric awakenings cut off at ceiling height and compressed within four walls? A post-adolescent border who exiles himself in a room.

Dostoevsky gives the perfect picture in his "Notes from the Underground": a human being who self-appoints a destiny at the edge of society, alone, compulsively poisoned, and obsessively dedicated to ruminating on his own bile.

After years, however, a shock is imperative, he comes out of his hole, meets people, and recognizes himself rusty in the craft of living.

You have heard that "Rusty" is a kind of amphetamine double of "Spiderland," but I tell you it is always the same man and that drugs have nothing to do with it. It's always him, the same border, only with more years on his shoulders and inserted in a public context.

And what does a character of such a sort do? Exactly what Dostoevsky recounted: not only does he alternate catatonic moments with nihilistic outbursts, but he does so without transitions, without preambles, without reasons other than those of the incessant twists of his mind.

"Rusty" follows a path, and it is that of this man in the maze of relationships with the outside world.

Pieces like segments of public life, but a public life lived by a border.

An everyday life where each feeling overflows into another only to return to the starting point slightly altered.

Where the flaming throat of hardcore melts into the emollient solutions of spoken word.

Where austere instrumental stasis extinguishes punk-like tirades.

Where rhythms on the edge of progressive are lost in soft and stretched arpeggios.

And all the combinations, all the direction changes, all the stop and go are lubricated in a jam of unbalanced synapses that without interruption create and destroy, enrich and drain, dig and overflow.

In this sense, it is no coincidence that the first two tracks are the most linear and trace the boundaries, give the coordinates within which the reality of a border constantly bounces: soft guitar weavings that seem to allude to a newfound stability hide in becoming a lingering taste of disquiet that continually mounts until it bursts into the full electric assault.

And throughout the rest of the album, these two aspects contaminate each other, bite each other, seduce each other, wait for each other, and tell each other to go to hell in a context where the spatial dimension is never claustrophobic but always of a certain breadth.

This underground man has finally abandoned the basement of "Spiderland," has placed himself in the current of the world, and moreover, has acquired a certain rigor in his delirium: a sort of refined madness that distances itself from the shapeless convulsions of his youth. From that "Tweez" - so in need of attention - or from that awkward student of Dostoevsky's "White Nights."

Our border will grow more, but he will elevate his imbalance to a system only in complete adulthood. That of the calculated nihilism of June of 44 or of the Stavrogin from "The Demons."

But deep down, he will always believe himself to be a butterfly, the one you see on the cover. A butterfly surrounded by barbed wire and imbued with the light of a rusty heart.