Samuel Katarro
The Halfduck Mystery

Year 1968. Third floor of the building. In one room, an English teacher gives lessons to a young, inattentive student, in the second a music box keeps playing endlessly with a little girl staring at it with tired eyes, in the third another child sings a little song about a bat. The other rooms are colored by strobe lights, lit incense, people wandering aimlessly, up and down the stairs. From the speakers of a turntable comes sick and psychedelic music.

The young Alberto Mariotti (aka Samuel Katarro) continues his journey in music, and after the incredible debut ("Beach Party," 2008) which saw him don the guise of a young Robert Johnson possessed by the blues, only in the company of his guitar, skipping the rock ‘n’ roll epic, he catapults into one of the most creative yet elusive periods of rock music. This time he is helped by a group of musicians, the Tragic Band, who color the songs with dissonant violins, organs, percussion, and wind instruments. What emerges is a psychedelic concentrate that escapes in a thousand directions, leaving the imagination open and creating a pathos I hadn’t felt in an Italian record for a long time.

Samuel Katarro, it is immediately noticeable, loves music, and although he has just surpassed twenty years of age, his compositions are children of the past and of a musical culture built by listening to his parents' records. This second album can baffle those who had already praised the blues soul that contaminated his sinister debut. Here the coordinates are the psychedelia of Syd Barrett, the earliest Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, the 13th Floor Elevators, the bizarre melodies of the Beatles in acid, and the nascent scene of the Californian west coast.

Samuel Katarro's voice, his great strength, ranges from falsetto to becoming grave in the amazing and initial "Rustling", closed by the melodious oboe played by Mario Frezzato.

Visions of psychedelic blues, between Barrett and Captain Beefheart in "Pink clouds over the Semipapero", guided by the madness of Enrico Gabrielli and Wassilij Kropotkin (Francesco D'Elia, author of almost all arrangements), while the beginning of "Pop Skull" reverberates the visions of Dylan's Blonde on blonde, the ramshackle "The first years of Bobby Bunny" is pure circus madness with a leading tuba. The unease of living on the margins emerges deeply in every track of the album, the mistrust towards the world and the desire to find one's own path are tangible.

It’s easy to imagine a Volkswagen van headed towards Woodstock in "Three minutes in California"; more challenging is to navigate through the almost psychedelic cacophony of "'S Hertogenbosch blues Festival" or the psychoindustrial "I am Musonator" and "Sudden Death", built purely from samplers and loops. The album is played entirely live, with few overdubs, "The Halfduck Mystery" is a candidate to be one of the most interesting releases of Italian music in this first half of the year; above all, Samuel Katarro proves to be one of the most extraordinary musical talents of our country, who I'm sure would already be praised abroad and showered with accolades. What should we expect now from this young talent? One thing has become clear: Samuel Katarro enjoys surprising and being surprised, playing with music.

Too many ways, in too many directions...Cross knowing looks, between me and the void... from "I Am the Musonator"