My Review: Ataraxia - "Pomegranate - The Chant of the Elementals"

 Ataraxia - "Pomegranate - The Chant of the Elementals".

Immersed in a world that has been hosting us for thousands of years, we have lost respect, curiosity, awe and the propensity to study its immense and never fully known qualities. Nature is dying and with it our intelligence that has condemned it, first wounding and then mercilessly attacking it.

There are dreams that live in those few souls that instead continue that path of closeness full of love and understanding and throw millions of kilometres of sweetness into notes able to  envelop you in an embrace full of poetry. They come from Ataraxia who, with their twenty-eighth album, delight our listening as never before, taking us into a fairy tale that seems anachronistic, such is the immense romantic and subtle charge of an approach that, intimate and full of suggestions, delights us. 

Rather than a journey, it is a pause in the circumference of time, where we are seduced by characters and places in order to contemplate a pleasure within sight, an invitation to separate ourselves from deafness and blindness.

We enter into the art of enchantment that survives, gasps but resists, to give us its jewels again as a gift, and the band from Modena does nothing but show them to us with infinite grace, in its circumnavigation inside mental places, more than physical.

The musical blend seems to have the same marks as always, the ones that have put them on the podium for decades, without ever falling off.

But they have been able to raise the bar and travel within ancestral oscillations with magnets charged with magic never seen before: one enters the pre-medieval garden with effective temporal leaps, mixing that serene journey with their usual capacity for ethereal acts akin to baroque, classical and a gothic borderline that remains, like DNA that cannot be rejected.

Beauty is something one encounters by chance because it is piloted by the conservative gods: Ataraxia have met it within splendid obstacles and placed it in these tracks, aware that the choice to share it with all of us could be a lonely merry-go-round without eyes and ears to observe and hear the hypnotic sphere they have conveyed.

So we have bows, genuflections, prayers, odes, in a sensual approach that gravitates within the will to preserve the idyll of an encounter that is not only cathartic but above all beneficial, with songs like moon seeds that water the mystery on the boiling and panting Earth.

Like oil lamps that illuminate time without taking the present into account, so do these celestial whispers which would surely be an offence to call songs or compositions: they perform aware that even listening should have in itself ancient elements, free of those modern-day sound deflagrations that have little to do with musicality. But rather than listening, it seems more like a reading of a great encyclopaedia where everything is detailed, teaching us the good fortune of the dream and its transmitting channels that would thicken knowledge and maturity. Boredom is banished and instead an umbilical cord is laced with multiple forms of expression, to better define this fairytale that does not want to connect with the modern, protecting His Majesty Time from afar: to listen to it is to become effortless angels who, by seeing the beauties of the world, become eternal. Let us possess, then, forgotten tools to be able to understand and make fluid the encounters we have: from water, to fire, to the symbols that make our stay sacred, to the approaches of benevolent spirits who extend their hand, everything is a film that wants to preserve the natural expiration of life and its paths. Ataraxia seem like druids, sentinels of knowledge setting fire to the ash that becomes the pentagram of the dreamlike moment in perpetual state of motion, on which they feed. Everything is a chant, in its original meaning, devoid of confusion, capable of remaining elevated and full of power, from suggestion to poetry that is not written but comes out of the uvula and of hands on instruments that bless the light with divine aptitude.

Vittorio and Giovanni enter the lair of sound, in solitary apnoea, to condense in their veins all the benefits, the gems, the sparks that Francesca translates into melodic prayers, into vocalisations like trails of eels that escape capture: it is only by elevating oneself that one is preserved, and the three of them do it magnificently.

Everything is versatile: it could not be otherwise, because when exploring the infinite one cannot bind oneself to an attitude, to preferences, and here we are faced with craters and skies, eruptions and paths of contemplation that connect styles and needs under the banner of good taste.

Losing one's compass does not mean weakening: it is exactly the opposite and the trio shows us its value, its strength, taking us by the hand where the only reference is the magic palette on which to walk, like the mystical encounter with an odour without seeing where it comes from, since this album is to be sniffed with one's eyes closed. 

There was a time when people wanted to define their music by different styles and modes, but now the moment has come to separate ourselves from uselessness and become aware that it is above all a sensory and visual experience, the Art that snubs the vocabulary of mediocrity to fly through its motions as a cultural need able to refresh and comfort.

 Listening to Pomegranate - The Chant of the Elementals is the experience that makes us fly over the abyss, meeting the intoxication of the sunbeams that proceed in their path, oblivious to superstructures and banal clichés. They have succeeded in the arduous task of continuing their nomadism without losing an ounce of their class, in fact it seems that a breath of fresh air from the north of Time has led them to new energies and contemplative forms: this band is made up of pupils of existence with questions perpetually attached to their breaths, with no chance of getting bored. 

The more you listen to this record, the greater the conviction that they are protected from ageing and squandering their enchanting possessions.

Persuasive, erotic, energetic, contemplative: their heavenly vault is a keyless shell that can be accessed if one has the will to be oblivious to all that cripples our path. 

After finishing the album, one rises from a cloud with a full belly and the smile of an intoxicated and serene young soul: if this is not what we expect from art, then let us surrender to the darkness, because Ataraxia are exempt from mediocrity.

An incredible collective mantra is about to enter your minds: be curious since the spells here are the core of the whole that awaits you…

Song by Song 

Hlara Aralh

The heart immediately shows its mettle with the opening track: a slow breath that builds up strength, opening up the sky with an arpeggio and vocals that take us into the rays of the sun.

Oruphal

It is an invocation, a recognition of the meaning of the journey and nature drinking its beauty. A delicate atmosphere, transported by the smiling wind, where Francesca's voice becomes full of diadems and sparks, with a falsetto that nails, between Totem Bara's lightning and Vittorio's accurate work, for an enthralling lullaby that makes one travel relaxed.

Ozoonhas

The musical texture thins out, hands enter our chest for a composition that combines evocation with the metamorphosis of blissful sounds, devoted to enchantment. A basic motif seals it and then, slowly, we gather shining inlays.

Nevenhir

Pure vocals that lubricate the veins, Vittorio's subtle system is a God with a light touch. Rising emotionally, the combination of notes programmed to soften thoughts reigns securely. In the meantime, the band continues to make beauty visible with guitar notes that sound like silk spider webs and with Giovanni's keyboards weeping as an act of love. Everything is then made perfect by the interplay of voices that cross each other and make us slaves of dark joy.

Ode ad Afrodite 

If the goddess of beauty is paid the right tribute, one might fear failure. Impossible: Ataraxia take up the pentagram of sweetness and vision, writing images deposited on papyri of celestial enchantment. Not only everything comes to be ethereal, but above all it becomes a chorus of roses that open up, releasing the perfume of Aphrodite. 

And it is the renaissance of the senses floating over our blissful listening.

Ode a Dioniso

Greece enters in the song dedicated to a divinity who sanctioned the indissoluble bond between Nature and man, and in these times of absolute destruction of this relationship, Ataraxia show us a tense song, full of anger and powerful reflection. We descend into the womb of tension to correct our mistakes at least a little bit. 

Aura Magi

Ataraxia's sampling of artistic and stylistic possibilities also includes making music a vocabulary of languages and knowledge, methods that expand as in this sidereal, magnetic, hypnotic track, with electronica that with a minimal manner goes through the possibilities of this combo which reaches up to the foot of the sacred altar of the senses.

Hummingbirds

The whole album suggests listening to nature, where animals are not the outline of our fear but part of a divine design. With an enchanting crooning Francesca makes her visionary tale vibrate with musical notes that float in the air like splashes of truth to be held in the hand. 

Amethyst

In the country of Bel Canto, Francesca teaches how much is still lodged in the now distracted Italian national DNA, the way of making this activity a divine bill. Keyboards become a cloud of time to pull us away from ugliness and we are angels for three hundred and thirty seconds. The guitar sketches minimal strokes of echoes that permeate the 80s, suggesting celestial vibrations.

The album ends as it began: when you listen to it you are mute, to let the beauty pass through us.

Out on 21st September 2022

The Circle Music

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld 

Torino

4th August 2022

Francesca Nicoli - vocals

Vittorio Vandelli - classical and electric guitars, programming, back vocals

Giovanni Pagliari - keyboards, piano, back vocals

Guest musician: Totem Bara - cello, timpani