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Rating: - In Sardinia, a "tanca" is a flat or hilly land, uncultivated, possibly used for grazing. To see them, they would seem to be of little value. For a dispute over a tanca, a man gets a slug in the face and, with him, anyone trying to preserve his surname through the generations. Just a few square meters perceived as an improper appropriation, any little thing that injures an honor, is enough. Whoever once told me that matters of principle do not exist, was from outside.
Tanca, in Sardinian - with Spanish derivation - is also a verb form: the imperative "close," present indicative "closes."
If you go for snails or myrtle berries, be careful not to climb over a dry stone wall or a wire fence, because you might offend the dog and the shepherd. It doesn’t matter if the wall is low: closes, and at that point, you’re warned.
When Verdena attacks Tanca, there is an explosion of fuzz. But is it Nuclear Isaac? There is the approach of a dark imminence marked by a martial and swollen bass. Naturalistic notations with blood and death, sung by that usual gruff voice.
When in the chorus Luca wears out the cymbals and Alberto explodes into distant shores, you can clearly hear eight bursts.
Then comes a breakthrough, the dragging and malevolent, almost doom-like cadence dissolves into a triumph of crescendo guitars with Alberto who, finally, plays with the sounds, the pedals and the harmonizations. Little sheep and cowbells.
- It is not true that there is a strong culture of meat eating in Sardinia. That story of porceddu, or whatever the idiots call it, spinning for hours impaled and gutted on the coals of all the true-Sardinians-ajò, is an exaggeration: the abuse is a recent historical fact, provoked by foreign influences. If a Sardinian tells you that you absolutely must eat a piglet, slaughtered and cooked according to traditional rules, he is a stupid Sardinian. It’s a cooked and aromatic little pig that is shit/great like everywhere else in the world.
Anthropologically, we are not inclined to that. In areas that survive by farming, animals aren’t killed lightly. Regular meat consumption was the prerogative of the few wealthy. For others, there were occasions, Sundays, festivals with their rituals.
Carne talks about a festival. Thank you, Verdena, for keeping that little synth arpeggio at the beginning. Then it mimics a Mediterranean wind and the Verdena interpret the festival as a hallucinatory '70s sabbat, acid and evil, you die and delay. Drenched in fuzz, with semitones that mean blues and mean foreign and sinister things.
Alberto croaks filtered. Acoustic guitars, vibraphones, female choirs appear. A psychedelic festival, as I said.
The structure coils, seems to go somewhere, comes back there. The cowbell on the drums accompanies, always very welcome.
Tanca and Carne are two songs by Iosonouncane. You can find them on the album Die, which in English means to die and in Sardinian means the day. It came out last year and it seems to be one of the best Italian albums of recent years, for those who establish these hierarchies; some even say the best. It talks about nature and human nature.
Tanca was a claustrophobic march, with the guttural sounds of human basses. Here it becomes violent.
Carne was a Mediterranean epic chant of synthesizers. Here it turns acidic, complex, hallucinatory.
The Verdena are from Bergamo and thus what do they know. But they did well.
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They say that Jacopo Incani, Iosonouncane, with his latest album has turned to experimental electronic music, that he's an innovator not only for the Italian scene, but also for the in-ter-na-tio-na-l one, dude. They hear a beat, a reverb, a minimal layering, and immediately go saying it's shperimental.
But what is experimental. Incani has already proven to be a very institutional singer-songwriter, with the critical eye of Faust'O, the high drives of Fortis, and now more than ever something of Battisti that maybe we'll see later. You hear it as experimental because he has recently taken a thematic turn towards ancestral, folkloristic sounds, but he has updated them to new trends, which aren't even that brand new. Stuff that Animal Collective and Flaming Lips, dude, they've already done before. But even Radiohead eh. In this sense, more than being an innovator, he has revitalized a dying and moldy scene, condemned to exhausted and tacky distribution circuits.
Die, with synths and beats, has restored a capacity to capture even commercially, appeal, to a potentially interesting world which, however, was damn stuck in the watussi the very tall blacks; as a point of reference in Creuza de ma. Then Jovanotti wanting to cancel the debt. Then Negrita rolling on to hell.
Before they were ethnic things for half-hippies, and for professional moms and dads who were half-hippies when young: now, they can be engaging things again, that tell you something and you dance to them in clubs. And maybe records no longer have obscene tribal graphics, and even musicians perhaps wake up a bit.
Stormi plays in DJ sets. At Iosonouncane's concerts, there are also people who don't stink. I hope Die has pointed to a new way.
But when he reprises these two new pieces by Verdena, who in Endkadenz worked a lot on the sound, structure, and search for the different, even managing to make nice things, does Iosonouncane still sound experimental, innovative, and all that? No.
But I don't want to say he did a bad job.
I like his cover of Diluvio. It highlights the gospel traits of the original piano ballad. And the gospel, if you know how to manage it, is one of those things that calls emotion. Diluvio was already beautiful, but the production a bit mortified it, and above all, it mortified the vocal performance. Jacopo Incani sings, and a lot. The octave-doubled high-low works beautifully here, Incani's timbre suits it perfectly, and the song, in its fundamental traits, comes out even enhanced.
The heavy electronic orchestration gives the sacredness of it all the features of a journey. The sacredness is also reiterated and pushed to the extreme, between choirs, echoes, arpeggiators, and that sort of organ with the voice effect that sounds old as death but incredibly works. Everything succeeds without falling into cloyingness, and here it wasn't easy.
Here, as sometimes in Die, there is the minimalist drumming: hi-hat mostly absent, implied kick drum hits, isolated snare. If you're doing a ballad, in 2016, you need to consider these things.
So did Iosonouncane, in a four-track split, place a sort of mini concept on Endkadenz. Yes, the arpeggiator comes back exactly the same on Identikit, even that wuh-uh female. Identikit is spectacular even like this. There's a jungle-type beat underneath that imitates the original percussion, then the real percussion comes in, then the claps, the maracas, then the drum skipping beats, there's a super fuzzy synth underneath, and the diva voice with stadium reverb. Then there's a cheesy synthesizer from years ago, then the jungle beat returns, the voices grow and then everything stops and again old-style electronic orchestrations and it's all very intense and suggestive.
They know how to do these psychedelic instrumental codas; there's nothing to say.
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Iosonouncane and Verdena share a recent fascination with Battisti and a way of handling the syntax of verse and period that promotes musicality, rather than text intelligibility.
Now they are doing some dates together, and from Verdena's side, the whole operation seems to me a nice gesture. Iosonouncane deserves everything and here he thanks and reaffirms it. We thank them too, as after Die we were wondering what would happen to him, and we now discover that the intention is probably to stay faithful to the very compact sound of his latest breakthrough.
You can feel in the album the good atmosphere between them, and also the mutual respect, because such carefully arranged arrangements, such evidently heartfelt interpretations, require that commitment which betrays great passion.
Well done everyone.
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