Vinicio Capossela
Marinai, Profeti e Balene

The tendency to avoid well-trodden paths, not just in a musical sense, paths that perhaps he himself had opened, could only lead Vinicio Capossela to a journey on the open sea, in that dimension that connects the intoxication of shipwreck with the sweet-salty nostalgia of return and missing lands. A crank-driven odyssey, therefore, in that fluid universe where inspiration draws from the boundlessness and the womb of the submerged, as well as from the treasures of literary tradition and its mythologies, here elevated to the north star. The guiding spirit is primarily that of Melville and his literary inventions, but the cultural references are numerous. They carve a path through the waters, but Vinicio freely wanders through that gap, freely chasing the reflections of the wakes, the secondary paths, the water games determined by the passage of that poetic flotilla.

On the cover, against the backdrop of a sullen and tranquil sea, stands in contrast, from the waist up, a Capossela in the guise of a resurrected Ahab, a silhouette of a ghost ship commander with a black pirate's soul, an indelible effigy etched on resurfaced wrecks, nevertheless steady in the apparent precariousness of constantly imagined shores.

Capossela dedicates himself to a cyclopean work (but with many eyes), all-encompassing, with a theatrical setup that alternates ballads and recitatives, choral polyphonies of Greek tragedy and sound effects, heart-wrenching introspections and funeral march tones, dodecaphonic murmurs, plaisanteries of a ditty, band-like lullabies, musical daring, and jingle punctuations. In front of the essentiality of natural elements, starting from the fertile humility of man, which in their presence is a fragile spectator but also a creator of their very meaning, Capossela resorts to simple sounds, echoing melodies that seem to exist always and forever, within reach like winds or currents that merely demand to be heard. He captures them along the line of vast horizons and in the apparent calm of calms that thicken the rolling of ships without a course and the suspended breath of submerged Leviathans. But in the act of this decal, on the traces of the pre-existing, opens the spell of an autonomous and dizzying space from which the charm of this album emerges, which invades us gradually, arriving slowly like the wave of a tide that dissolves the lumps of our moorings.

This work absorbs and reflects, admirably, the measure of the slowness and depth of the marine universe detaching itself like a fertile wreck from the crystallized cycles of earthly vanities. The song, now soothing, now briny, harmonizes the pirate or adventurous surface sagas with the muted underwater rumble of a universe teeming with threatening entities, heralding imminent upheavals; the lapping waters, where the visionary sweetness of the melody rests, with the anxieties arising from an inscrutable world, from the absence of defined spaces.

Everything flows in the ambiguous sign of cruelty and generosity, of sacrifice and new beginnings. But the epic, from whatever point it is considered, is regenerating. It shows us how every journey by water is a shipwreck and vice versa. Here Capossela undertakes a journey out of itineraries, embarking on the circumnavigation of the sea, the titanic seal of human experience.

Stefano Cardarelli