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Rating: "At the Borders Between Sardinia and Jazz" is a historical & stoic predominantly jazz music festival that has been held more or less consecutively for thirty years in the tiny municipality of S'Anna Arresi, an oasis rooted in the deep southwest proto-island.
Glancing at the lineup of the 1996 edition, one immediately realizes it was an unusual festival, even more particular than usual and those that followed:
Michel Petrucciani
Ivano Fossati
Noa & Band
Diatriba
Herbie Hancock
Little Bird
Elena Ledda & Sonos Special Guest Noa
Fontella Bass Spiritual Gospel
Joshua Redman
Orchestra Jazz Della Sardegna
Unsane
Crash Worship
Unsane and Crash Worship in the midst of it all are as fitting as crabs for breakfast, someone might say.
Nonetheless, they were included in the lineup a few days apart: they did not stun the audience from the central square of the Nuraghe (where the festival is usually held) but in a sort of dance hall created among the pines just a few dozen meters behind the beach.
The two concerts were conceived as a "side event" and the concluding highlight of that edition: in mid-September, they performed in sequence first the ragtag, furious CW, then the following week the Mephistophelean trio from New York.
If you don't know who they are, either take an immediate crash course or it might be best to leave this wasteland of stragglers forever.
It's a suggestion. Not advice.
The New York trio's tour supported what is unanimously considered their masterpiece: the eschatological/escapist "Scattered, Smothered & Covered."
Now that I think about it, I received directly from the bleeding fingertips of Vinnie Signorelli a 45 rpm (vinyl, of course) with a predatory cover published specifically for the European tour.
I should still have it somewhere. I'll look for it later.
But let's get back to us, or rather to them.
The Unsane.
I remember that evening/night in Porto Pino it was noticeably damp, almost cold: for our latitude, that is.
Let's say 15-16° Fahrenheit or Celsius, depending on your preference.
If my memory serves me right, there was also an Italian support group that (maybe) had arranged the dates on the boot-shaped soil: I think they were more or less Noise Rock too. But don't ask me their name. Nor my Breil.
Around 23.00, today Chris, Vinnie, and Dave decided to step onto the wooden and dilapidated boards of the stage, deciding that those (maybe) eighty/one hundred desperadoes who had chosen to properly thrash their auditory system would receive what they deserved that night.
On the sides of the stage, there were two rather basic speakers and little else to amplify everything: yet incredibly the sound is (was) overall more than dignified and powerful.
The tracks from the then recent "Scattered" turned out to be simultaneously powerful thrusts to the heart and deadly adrenaline rushes to the brain: I remember Chris's hallucinated/distorted gaze that enveloped, almost swallowed, the microphone during the "sung" moments as if he were in front of me right now; besides, his feral grin was just over two meters from me.
Midway through the set, I recall that it even started raining: if they had also covered "Raining Blood," I'm sure Beelzebub would have appeared from the rear and the world would have collapsed: luckily, they avoided it.
The executions (in every sense) of the monumental "Scrape," "Can't See," and the harmonized "Alleged," lashed the air and the increasingly sparse and drenched missing people under the stage mercilessly.
I still seem to hear that blinding tangle that came out of the amplification. Or maybe it's because as I write, the record is playing in the background.
I don't know about you, but there have been concerts I don't even remember attending: despite being perpetually sober and lucid (so to speak).
This, even though authentic aeons have passed, surely is (was) not one of them.
After greeting and thanking with a gentlemanly handshake (reciprocated) all the members of the trio, we returned home happy and content even though on the way back we crushed a multitude of frogs that had curiously decided to invade large stretches of the roadway.
It never happened again.
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