Vanessa Van Basten
La Stanza Di Swedenborg

Call me if you need anything or if you're scared.

Scared... I'm not scared. I've learned to disdain Anguish and Solitude, in the name of the far more alluring Irony, who every now and then gives you those rather sharp retorts that I don't really like, but in the end, she's a good girl.

Need? For what? For whom? For someone to hold my hand and guide me towards the light? To open the doors of the Room for me? I wouldn't know how to answer. I knock twice. Yes. I've reached it... but I think I can no longer breathe. I just have to wait...

Vanessa! Vanessa, wake up! Good morning, Vanessa Van Basten! But it’s not exactly a clear and crisp morning. Even when the sun shines high and nothing seems able to glare at it, the wind carries the laughter of children and their dolls, wheezing Love - deluded. There is no Giornada De Oro. In the Room of Swedenborg, there are only whispered words that emerge from the Whole for a few seconds before being buried again. On this journey towards the Light, it's instinctive, perhaps, to get lost in darkness, in that indescribable labyrinth once sung by Poe...

Mesmer plays with our insides.

I don't know if I've fully grasped the message that Morgan Bellini and Claudio Parodi, the two insane multi-instrumentalists hidden behind Vanessa, want to convey to us. They've buried it under a shroud of riffs that could make Jesu envious, ethereal passages where Isis flirts with Mogwai, indigestible yet somewhat familiar tectonic shifts. They caress and crush at times pineal glands at will, managing never to excess in either sense. At first glance, Vanessa's path is a negatively oriented arc that starts and plunges into a substantial general surrender towards Miss Life, only rarely contradicted by ironically sunny and relaxed glimpses, but intrinsically infected. So much so that the vague carefree childhood of the golden day is immediately contradicted by the negative discharges of the two extremes of the record. No, I correct myself... this is an apolar record. There is no specific and categorical predominance of a particular feeling. These are just moments, filtered through the eyes of two sly cats that seem to look at you with a barely sketched smile and a slightly crooked eyebrow, as if to say: "did you notice that it’s all pointless?" Thus, we move from the violence of the title track to the melancholic instrumental interludes of "Love" and "Vanja", to reach forcefully epic tones in the two drone chords of the astonishing Awakening. Space is also given to glimpses between the clouds in the beautiful acoustic turns of "Giornada de Oro", the most atypical and interesting moment in a record of this kind, which clearly shows the versatility of the minds behind it.

"The jaw drops a little and then it's over
most of the time nothing else happens."

A project like Vanessa Van Basten was absolutely necessary in our stifling local scene. I don't want to reveal too much about their music (which I believe I haven't really done anyway hehe) to encourage you to discover what, perhaps, we could define as the most talented Italian band of the new millennium.

Happy awakening in the Room of Swedenborg with Vanessa.