Rome
Die Aesthetik Der Herrschafts-freiheit

And yet I wondered, as 2011 was slipping away: why isn't the latest Rome album coming out? Used to a release every ten months or so, the absence of the latest Rome album had become a vague absence that contradicted a routine that in recent years had become, far from tedious, a reassuring certainty.

So 2011 passed without a Rome release, something understandable if you think of an artist who, in just five years, had managed to release five albums and an EP, all of more than good quality, by the way. But it was just my lack of attention: at the dawn of this 2012, I discover that the good Jerome Reuter certainly hasn't been idle. Not only does he not stop; he doesn't just double but triple! Meaning that in November of last year, our man had almost secretly released “Die Aesthetik der Herrschafts-Freiheit”, a box set released in limited edition which — due to unexpected public and critical acclaim — Trisol providentially reissues in quick succession in the form of no less than three albums: “Aufbruch – A Cross od Wheat”, “Aufruhr – A Cross of Fire”, and “Aufgabe – A Cross of Flowers”.

Animating the endeavor is “L' Estetica della Resistenza” by Peter Weiss (German writer, playwright, and painter), a titanic work divided into three volumes that Rome's respective albums take as a starting point and go on to retrace, enriching the discourse with countless contributions (Bertold Brecht, Pablo Neruda, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russel just to mention the best-known names), delineating what we might call one of the most ambitious works ever nurtured within the controversial empyrean of apocalyptic folk.

But let's take a step back, specifically returning to the times of “Flowers from Exile,” the work that pushed the entity Rome beyond the confines of neo-folk to project it into a broader area where Jerome Reuter's music became noble and transformed into committed songwriting. The work, which dealt with the Spanish Civil War, required such a documentation effort that it blossomed new stimuli in the young Luxembourg singer, so much so that the operation required a sequel, the equally beautiful “Nos Chants Perdus,” set instead in the years of the occupation in France. But evidently, Reuter's journey into the history of the last century had not ended with just two albums, and as if driven by a renewed communicative urgency, Reuter was forced to work on the theme again: an outburst that had as its fruit no less than three albums, alias thirty-six new songs, alias one hundred and fifty minutes of new music, just to be clear.

Reuter's work was intense and, as he himself stated, from a commercial standpoint his effort was, at least in intent, an authentic commercial suicide: but if apocalyptic folk has a virtue, this virtue is that no artist dedicated to this genre will ever churn out a commercial work. Then, apocalyptic folk has many flaws, incompetent musicians, and irritating clichés, but this is not the case with Rome, which today more than ever stands out as the most brilliant star of a firmament in which the founding fathers themselves seem to have lost the compass and the conviction of yesteryear for several years now.

Reuter's work was intense, as was said, an exhausting activity that saw him for an entire year intent on accommodating his impulses alternating frenzied activity of composition/recording/historiographical documentation with the tranquility of the Belgian countryside where the studio of his friend Duke Baudhuin was immersed.

The work itself reflects the modus operandi of its creator who, starting from the basic outline set by Weiss's work, incessantly accumulated new stimuli, reworking them through the intense lyricism that has always characterized every step of his passionate journey.

“Be generous with your life, with your love, be generous always”

recites the paradigmatic “All For Naught,” and how can one disagree with an artist as consistent and rigorous as Reuter? One song after another (the night was reserved for composition, in the morning guitars and percussion were recorded, a couple of hours for sleep, and then after lunch everything else, finally in the evening a lucid moment to judge the fruits of one's labor, to keep or discard, and so on until the end), where the adoption of analog instrumentation left little room for corrections and retouches, giving the whole an immediacy and overwhelming inspiration.

Vintage sounds, then, music that aims for the essential (an unusual thing for a concept album spread over three albums) and except for certain spoken parts featuring the participation of Rupert Kraushofer, “Die Aesthetik der Herrschafts-Freiheit” is entirely composed, written, and performed solely by Reuter, who on this occasion doesn't even avail himself of the help of the faithful Patrick Damiani, who had greatly contributed to the economy of the sound of the latest works of Rome. The absence of a discerning producer and refined multi-instrumentalist like Damiani has indeed resulted in a return of Rome to more stripped-down sounds, more apocalyptic sonorities, which might seem like a step back in Reuter's journey, but which in truth allow for more freedom in the composition process, freeing him from a burden that could have become too cumbersome and from ornate arrangements that perhaps had ended up stiffening the sound of our man.

Of course, the legacy of albums like “Flowers from Exile” and “Nos Chants Perdus” remains determining, and it is felt in the Spanish guitars and transalpine accordions (even though Reuter's work speaks many languages, preferring a polyglot, multicultural, cosmopolitan, universal approach), but it is pleasant (and it was not something to be taken for granted) to note a return to more markedly neo-folk sonorities (the return of symphonies, martial percussion, frantic voices that incessantly overlap acoustic scores, all elements that had characterized the project's early steps), without losing the singer-songwriter's verve that had marked the recent journey at the same time.

In short, Reuter seems here to find the squaring of the circle, rediscovering his first love Douglas P., but rereading him in the light of an artistic talent now reached full maturity. And it is not an offense to describe this work as a sort of “But, What Happens When the Symbols Shatter?” of the third millennium, and neither is it an exaggeration to paint it as one of the most significant works born from the genre in recent years. If not THE most significant.

“Die Aesthetik der Herrschafts-Freiheit” is thus a masterpiece, not only for its contents, for its immense volume (and quantity almost never rhymes with quality), but for the ambitious concept that underlies it: a painstaking reinterpretation of recent human history, a transversal vision in which the concept of resistance is analyzed in its complex connections with the spheres of politics, economic establishment, and social dimension, all lived with a transversal spirit, neutral from an ideological point of view (at most imbued with that anti-capitalism that unites right and left) and in a utopian perspective where, at the end of a dark tunnel of suffering, degradation, and senselessness, the human nature seems to shine, the relationships of altruism and solidarity that survive the barbarities, the need/hope for a freedom not only sought but also deserved. An intellectual album, therefore, and with a positive message, strange for an apocalyptic folk album, no? But where Rome cannot fully emancipate themselves from the style of the genre and particularly from those imparted by Death in June (revitalized from every point of view, both its most introspective moments as well as the visionary power of its most tense works, such as for example “Take Care and Control” and “Operation: Hummingbird”), Reuter manages to surpass the entire scene creating, albeit through a dramatic expressive medium, a dream that is not just a yearning glances towards an irretrievable past, but is also and above all an act of denunciation/revolt/resistance aimed at the future and at a new order to be established (even if the mirage of this utopia is projected — given the bleak present — beyond the reasonable time span within which our existence is contained). But the message, I repeat, is painful yet positive at the same time, daring and courageous, a bit like the message of those enlightened minds that Reuter, another thinking mind, has decided to gather to support his own thinking. A nobility of intent that elevates the role of the artist in the flow and incomprehensible upheavals of human becoming, a role well expressed by the phrase that stands on the back cover of all three albums:

“Art Holds a Unity that History does not”.

The three volumes are obviously distinct for the themes dealt with and therefore they reflect the evolution of the concept decided to be treated. This results in different moods, although then, from a purely musical point of view, the three chapters move within the same coordinates, maintaining a formal balance, a sobriety that are unusual in a work of such duration, when often the artists, in similar circumstances, prefer to dilute the content in lengthy passages or indulge in tedious climaxes or endless suites. No, the endeavor is grand, but Reuter continues to build his art with simplicity, as if his album lasted a third of what it does: his songs continue not to go beyond a handful of minutes, except for some atmospheric interludes that like to linger a few minutes longer, but that ultimately do not cross the border of the simple frame, indispensable to better focus the artist's message and enhance the substance, the consistency of his art.

And so all three albums open and close in the name of an evocative ambient stained by the chaos of history, by voices, by testimonies, and by blurry images that dematerialize just before the celestial haze that leads to a regression into the deepest recesses of human nature. All three develop within the ranks of a balanced mix between symphonic interludes (“The Brute Engine,” “The Conquest of Violence,” “Appeal to the Slaves”), dark industrial visions (“Our Holy Rue,” “Families of Eden”) and Reuter's proverbial epic, intense, desolating folk ballads (“The Spanish Drummer,” “To Teach Obedience,” “Seeds of Liberation,” “August Spies,” “All For Naught”) that, in batches of two or three at a time, distribute themselves in an apocalyptic picture where clear singer-songwriter outbursts manage to survive (“The Death of Longing,” “In Cruel Fire,” “Little Rebel Mine”), post-punk declamations (“Sons of Aeth”) and genuine pop gems of authentic beauty (“Automation” above all) which certainly do not mar with their catchiness a context made of unspeakable dramas.

“Aufbruch – A Cross od Wheat,” “Aufruhr – A Cross of Fire,” and “Aufgabe – A Cross of Flowers” are the suffering, the impetus that leads to rebellion, the seed of revolt, and then the development of philosophical currents and ideologies, the explosion of wars, the establishment of totalitarianism, and finally the utopia, the mirage of a new world of freedom and solidarity where self-assertion and dedication to moral aesthetics triumph. It's impossible to describe the succession of emotions that this complex of things manages to emit, where all elements of Reuterian poetics find happy release, whether in the most violent phases, or in the more introspective moments that inevitably make for the counterpoint.

At first listen it's all magnificent, Reuter's voice is magnificent, Reuter is a true singer and his voice is a splendid epiphany amidst the chaos, a miraculous appearance capable of hypnotizing, moving, exciting, making one reflect from the first verses sung of “The Spanish Drummer” that burst forth after the roar of military percussion (a voice that declaims “give me silence, give me some truce!”), to extinguish in the emblematic phrase that opens the (almost) final “Ballots and Bullets”: “One world, one federation, a million tribes”.

It's all magnificent, but it's also like a bucket of water on a marble floor: impossible to absorb its beauty in one go. For this reason, “Die Aesthetik der Herrschafts-Freiheit” is to be sipped in small sips like the finest wine, and for this reason, it is advisable to let it grow on your bedside table along with the two volumes of Chekhov's stories.

Masterpiece.