Yoñlu
A Society in Which No Tear Is Shed Is Inconceivably Mediocre

LA RECENSIONE

To make a journey and a personal experience paradigmatic for a multitude or, worse, for the entire human race is among the most terrifying legacies of our current society.

The faded faces of rockstars on the t-shirts of fans, their lives becoming mere heroic deeds for the mediocrity of the latter, the Kurt Cobains becoming voices of anger for an entire generation, while they were only for their own, are among the most horrible crimes silently consuming our daily lives. And it is precisely for this reason that the story of Vinicius Gageiro Marques, is the one that has made my heart vibrate the most lately. Son of the high Brazilian bourgeoisie, an extremely sensitive boy, a very young suicide at the age of 16 (his death occurred on July 26, 2006), as well as an avid reader of Kafka, his story begins and ends in the purest dimension, that is, the individual one. His songs were composed by Vinicius solely for himself; that handful of autograph pieces now published in this posthumous "A Society in Which No Tear Is Shed Is Inconceivably Mediocre" ('09) by David Byrne's Luaka Bop, was found on the boy's computer only after the investigations following his death.

It is alien and alienating music that of Yoñlu (the nickname with which he shared his existential pain and - perhaps - also his suicide on the Internet; can we now also speak of web alienation?), a kaleidoscope of moods, which however goes from dark to pitch black. The same malaise of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith, evoked in a single breath of death, is sung by him with a melancholic emphasis typically Brazilian. The saudade of delicate acoustic soliloquies like "Humiliation" and "Estrela, Estrela", which recall his native idols Gilberto Gil and Vitor Ramil, however, changes in the terse and, unfortunately, prophetic, verses of "Suicide" into a claustrophobic, oppressive sadness. Sadness, perhaps, born of his crystalline talent because, beyond his incredible personal story, those of Vinicius are compositions that enjoy a beauty of their own, not far from the absolute. A very precocious sound alchemist, he manages to perfectly combine the flavors of his land (the samba of "Olhe Por Nós") with a certain chamber noise, product however, instead of in-depth sound research, only of his unstable psyche. Small visionary works like "The Boy and the Tiger", which divides between Morriconian epic and rap bordering on the grotesque, the introspection, almost slo-core, of "Polyalphabetic Cypher", the raga of "Q-Tip", the trip-hop divertissement of "Deskjet (Remix)" and the concluding "Waterfall", which again merges this electronic component with the fingerpicking of the aforementioned Drake and his unreachable pink moon, are vital and sophisticated at the same time, they are nothing but mental landscapes born of a painful inner urgency.

Unlike the famous shouts of rockstars on the path of self-destruction above, this is however a silent, mute shout. This annihilating hindsight makes all these songs an uncontaminated stream of consciousness. A "different" experience that has bewitched me...