Session 8 – Area, Banco, & Deus Ex Machina

 

This Wednesday night, our prog rock video series will feature concert footage from three fantastic Italian prog bands - Area, Banco, and Deus Ex Machina.  We plan to begin around 7:30, as usual at the E14 third floor video wall.  Background below.

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Yes, we all know that Italy is an extremely complex country.  Could the region that gave us, for example, the Renaissance, one of the world's great cuisines, and Silvio Berlusconi be a bastion for amazing prog rock?   The answer is an overwhelming naturalmente!

 

The Italian prog rock scene is vast - with roots dating back to the late 60's, many fantastic bands came out of Italy with music crossing genres - the country is even now still producing great prog rock bands.  You can hear the emotionalism, intensity, vibrancy, and beauty of Italy in its prog rock - even the most edgy of the Italian musical avant-garde pauses for a moment to relish a good moment in life before burning down the church again. The prog rock of Italy is rooted in its culture - you can often hear reflections of the Italian folk tradition, mediterranean influences, or musical fragments that remind you of something you've heard during the nightly passagate when the entire population of a small Tuscan hill town is out walking around on a wonderful spring evening. 

 

Italian prog is one of my favorite kinds of music - and the scene is so large that it's impossible to effectively capture it in my typical orientation paragraph.   But I'll try...  The typical Italian prog band features strong (often operatic quality) vocals with very agile instrumental performance, often emphasizing keyboards.  The lyrics in Italian vocal prog tend to be very developed, but even if one doesn't understand the language, the music carries the affect along profoundly, so little is lost.  Influences from the classic British prog bands (King Crimson, Gentle Giant, ELP, Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator) are strong, but Italian prog punches through this patina with pastiche and its own special fragrance.

 

Many of us in the US back in the early 70's knew of a few classic Italian prog bands who had a record or two domestically distributed then.  Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM) are probably the most famous, followed by Le Orme, New Trolls, and Banco, perhaps with a bit of early Franco Battiato (man, they play his recent records in the Bertucci's now...).  With few exceptions, these are great bands.  But it doesn't stop there - this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Digging a little more into the scene at that time, we have Museo Rosenbach, Celeste, Latte E Miele, Il Rovescio Della Medaglia, Osanna, Acqua Fragile, Semiramis, Goblin, and so many more - hundreds of bands, many interesting.  Then there is the fringe of Italian prog merging into jazz and Rock in Opposition - Picchio Dal Pozzo, Peregio, Stormy Six, Dedalus, Opus Avantra, and of course Area to name just some of the best.  Then there's the Italian "neoprog" - bands coming to prominence during the last decade or so - e.g., Finisterre, La Torre dell'Alchimista, La Maschera Di Cera, Areknamˇs, Il Tempio delle Clessidre, and Deus Ex Machina, just to seed your curiosity.

 

Cutting to the chase, the first of this week's bands will be Area.  Coming out of the 70's Italian left, these guys were hard core communists, singing about liberty from capitalistic tyranny, etc.  But what powerful music they wrote, and what completely amazing and inspired players they were!  This band wrote the anthems for their generation.  But, although they termed themselves ironically "pop", they were solid experimentalists, plugging their instruments into early synthesizers, experimenting with the limitations of the human voice, and even collaborating with John Cage.  Their records expertly blend bits of solid rock, intense jazz, eastern european folk, arabic influences, and noisy improvisation.  They formed in 1972 and disbanded in 1978 - the core members of the band included Paolo Tofani on guitar (having worked at EMS in London he was an expert at electronically extending the sound of the guitar), Patrezio Fariselli on piano and synthesizer, and most critically, Demetrio Stratos on vocals.  Startos was one of the most amazing vocal performers to come out of the Italian rock and new music scene - he's something of a legend.  In addition to his work with Area, Stratos put out a string of fantastic experimental vocal albums where he would push the human voice to its capacity and beyond.  He tragically died from leukemia at the age of 35, a few years after Area disbanded (my Italian friends at the time thought that it was brought on by drugs that he took to extend his vocal capacity, but that remains unfounded).  Unfortunately much of the video footage of Area in concert comes from RAI broadcasts where they dubbed the songs from their records over the live video, hence we need to live with Milli Vanilli, at least until something better surfaces.  We'll start the night off with a couple of pieces from these RAI broadcasts.

 

The next band will be Banco del Mutuo Soccorso (usually just called "Banco") - one of the most popular bands in Italy during the early 70's.  Banco were also somewhat political and artistically uncompromising in their first years, producing long pieces of complex music driven by their extraordinary vocalist Francesco Di Giacomo and the keyboard work of Gianni Nocenzi dueling with this brother Vittorio's guitar playing.  Some of you may have seen Di Giacomo in a brief cameo appearance in Fellini's Armacord, where he was cast as the gruff bearded sultan.  We'll be showing a couple of pieces from a reunion tour Banco did in 1992 that nicely capture some inspired moments from this classic prog band.

 

The last band we'll feature is Deus Ex Machina.  Hailing from Bologna, they began as something of an Italian metal band in 1991, evolving into fantastic jazz/fusion/prog virtuotos.  The playing from all members is nothing short of amazing, and their music is very intense.  Their vocalist, Alberto Piras, comes close to matching the capability and virtuosity of Demetrio Stratos from Area, and sings most songs exclusively in Latin.  We'll show a concert that they filmed at Le Triton in Paris in 2006 - this will dominate the evening.

 

OK - you can find out more about Deus Ex Machina here, for example:

 

http://www.derepublica.com/

 

Banco here:

 

http://www.bancodelmutuosoccorso.it/

 

For Area, go to Paolo Tofani's site and surf from there - his story is pretty engrossing:

 

http://www.krsnavision.com/personal/Personal-PT.html

 

And wikipedia has essentially a book chapter on Stratos, which I highly recommend perusing - he led a unique and brilliant life at the juncture between pop, avant-garde art, and research:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demetrio_Stratos

 

Yes, this is final project week, and many of us are busy.  But Italian Prog is one of the good things in the world that puts life into proper perspective - feel free to bring your work or project to the third floor lounge and share in some of this amazing music while you toil...  It's always refreshing.

 

 

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Joe Paradiso (Spring 2011)