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Area: “Mela di Odessa”

From the album Crac! (1975)

Active from 1972 to 1983, Area was a pioneering Italian group that creatively synthesized currents of American popular music such as jazz and funk with experimental tendencies in song form and sound production. Led by the Orphic incantations of vocalist Demetrio Stratos, Area featured a rotating cast of musicians anchored by the core group of Giulio Capiozzo (drums), Patrizio Fariselli (keyboards), Ares Tavolazzi (bass and trombone), and Paolo Tofano (guitar).

Crac! is Area’s third album, following Arbeit macht frei (1973) and Caution Radiation Area (1974). Although they disbanded within a few years of Stratos’ untimely death in 1979, the group’s early records earned them a spot on the legendary Nurse with Wound List, a hugely influential catechism of underground music circa 1980.

“Mela di Odessa” (The Apple of Odessa”) opens with a noisy burst of chirping electronic tones, atonal guitar noodling, and a raucous drum solo, leading into a driving jazz-rock texture topped by a piercing electric keyboard solo. Stratos’ trademark wordless vocalizations occasionally double the instrumental parts, leading through a frenzied labyrinth of improvised passagework. About halfway through, the mood changes quite suddenly, as the the drums and bass introduce a funky, off-kilter groove. Twittering electronic noise, Stratos’ spoken words, and brassy interjections—including a quotation of “Taps“—bring the track to a highly ambiguous close.

In his liner notes to the 1990 re-release on Cramps Records, Franco Bolelli writes: “To sink one’s teeth into the Area apple is to experience a taste which is neither the penitential taste of the avant-garde nor the tamed taste of the spectacle. Area has proven that the poetic and the experimental is not at all difficult and suffering. Indeed, it can be energetic and contagious.”

January 25, 2012, 9:39pm

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Banco del Mutuo Soccorso: “Cento mani e cento occhi”

From the album Darwin! (1972)

In the dubious estimation of musical common sense, the 1970s are typically represented as years of sorrow, a vast artistic wasteland.  The unfortunately prominent developments of adult contemporary and disco helped stain this decade with the reputation of slick, soulless overproduction. But— aside from the fact that there is a time and place for Giorgio Moroder and yes, even Barry Manilow— beneath the surface, the 1970s is one of the most rich and varied periods in the entire century, spanning everything from the brilliant funk/soul fusion of Curtis Mayfield in the U.S. to the groundbreaking works of “acousmatic music” presented in France by composers such as Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani.

One of the most fascinating phenomena of the decade is the international diffusion of progressive rock, which had been launched by a handful of (mostly) British bands in the late 60s.  Prog rock, with its classical and jazz influences, its sophisticated song structures, and its expansion of the sonic palette beyond the tired, guitar-dominated sound of conventional rock, quickly spread across the European continent, and took on distinctive new forms far removed from its often cloying and affected Anglophone incarnations.

One of the most impressive products of this development was Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (roughly, “Bank of Mutual Aid”), an Italian prog-rock band founded by the brothers Vitorio and Gianni Nocenzi in Rome in 1969.  Their eponymous debut album was released in 1972.  Later that year, Banco recorded what is widely regarded as one of the defining works of the genre, a concept album inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and entitled simply Darwin!

“Cento mani e cento occhi” (“A hundred hands and a hundred eyes”) is to my ears the album’s highlight.  At just over five minutes long, the song is quite compact by prog-rock standards, but its modest length compresses a multi-sectional, developmental structure of compelling dynamism, from the pseudo-classical fanfare of the opening to the stripped-down, two-chord intensity of the outro— all of it held together by the powerful operatic vocals of singer Francesco Di Giacomo.

July 27, 2010, 1:34pm