eNiB - Cut
"Nowadays, we see fog not because it exists, but because painters and poets have taught us what is the mysterious grace of its effect."
Oscar Wilde
There are mental palaces ascending, others descending, as they surround the quest and structure it, determining solid and liquid flows, until the freezing of truth, the only queen capable of giving authority to this true mission. Here is a soul who, starting from Rome, with its dense dangerous alleys, moved to Frascati, and defeated boredom, banality, and the absence of celebration of the useless to build an artistic path, begun by Echoes of Silence, to continue on very different emotional and expressive highways, drawing trajectories of studies that best delineated his sensibility and the great need to explore the void, to diminish the human fatness that prevents one from being lean and capable.
He wanted to cut everything short, and, you know, when that happens you separate the past from the future, compress dissatisfaction and what is indigestible and project yourself into what is unknown, using the available means offered by the present. Here then is the divine electronic choice, unfairly labelled as that which makes emotion and warmth absent, presenting us with its expressive avenue with nine projections, introspections, surveys and whatnot, which we will try to discover and pile up, together with the talent of those who have learned to enter the world of fog to build a different human track. Synth-ethical, Synth-omatic, in a sea of frenzies coming from the Yugoslavian torpor of the early 1980s, the method used is to vibrate the keyboard, to pilot the flights of its thinking into a musical structure that has an electric shadow zone. It is not the guitars that make us weep, it is the black and white keys, with its circuits full of wires and sweat, of controlled, polite nerves, made to explode without stupid distortions, to pilot an apparent form of detachment, but Filippo Biagioni Gazzoli has invented a gray rainbow, with shades and feathers that fly without falling.
Transistor wails, the messages, encoded as the old Coldwave used to do, are a heavy suit to wear. Every track on Cut shows us the pain of traversing the planet of behavior without, unfortunately, knowing how to renounce chaos. It is the impetuous Electro Dark that drives the Roman artist to visit the footprints of his thoughts and those of those around him: at those junctures his music is a cerebral operation, unsparing. The ebm, a violent love for Filippo if pleasant, in this work is an ideological rather than structural support: it is like always having a friend ready to listen to you. Because it is obvious that it is a set of pieces born to develop friendship with his silence, with the need not to share his path with anyone. You can tell by the compactness, the fluidity, the style that permeates each composition as if it were a long pilgrimage without necessarily having to change clothes.
The only exception is Come to Me, more robust, aggressive, the best black sheep in the family trying to stand out, also showing great qualities. And it is precisely with that track that the subtle ironic line is meant to present the bill to us all.
Cut demonstrates how, in order to know how to merit serious musical criticism by employing certain musical genres, rather than references that come from other nations, one must subtract the dangerous intention of copy and paste and study the perimeters within which technicalities might trivialize any approach. Philip succeeds: a work of love, of thanksgiving, of inspiration, a continuous birth where death, fear, tension are not hidden. Like lightning bolts, which have an awareness of the awe they give, the artist in question hurls broadsides of color, within his gray rainbow, to cross mood and loneliness.
It amazes, it marvels, it stuns at the production, the workshop work of sound that reigns supreme within the nine tracks. Majestic is the choice not to give the voice the task of piloting the listening: the music precedes, holds the sceptre, and the vocal chords are thoughtful in not disturbing, in seeking space to fit in and show a rationality that is never pedantic, obsessive or boring. Extraordinary is the delay in the release of this complex and bold sonic bundle: had it been released in 1983 it would have conquered the world. But it is clear, and it must be said, the fact that the instrumentation used to build the soundstage would not have been possible earlier. It is undeniable, however, that one traverses forests, great courses, climbs the cliff, rushes from the mountain of suffering with great courage. One dances to discover bone and muscle malfunction, slows down the rhythms and looks inward, like a dutiful magnet trying to glide effectively.
London, Berlin, Krakow, Bruges, Amsterdam, Moscow: ideal plazas waiting to celebrate those who know how to bandage borders and make all these places feel like a great hall to be inhabited, to unsettle, belong to, and tear each other apart while smiling at the fog...
Now let us visit these electronic vibrations, one by one, to machine-gun the mind with the visionary poetry of Filippo Biagioni Gazzoli...
Song by Song
1 - No Way Out
Front 242 where are you? Clock Dva what are you doing? Come here and listen to your Roman grandson: the work starts from a salt-filled, hazy, trembling splinter full of sonic tricks to drag the mind into a dutiful escape, not knowing if there is a way out that welcomes fear...
2 - Getting Nervous
A mantra, a killer loop, the atmospheres darkening, Darkwave-faced vocals move the muscles of the borders while the musical notes are weapons flying over nerves, scattering murderous microbes. The eighties show up in the melodic choice that imprints good Phillip and in the rhythmic shortcuts: syncopated rhythms to refresh the legs and to give the mind new oxygen. Dreary but balanced, measured toward the refuge that awaits a hypothetical psychiatric hospital...
3 - Limbo
One of the absolute summits, a sudden dazzle that shows us the artist's studies: the melody knows no immediate rhythmic complicity managing, when the drum machine begins to shake the air, to give us some extra energy, as this track is a whip on the heart, the voice knows a higher volume than others, and escapes into the hinted hisses, to make us fall asleep in the grayness of each limbo...
4 - Cut
Crashing, the shreds of confidence synthesized by swaggering, raw synthesizers: a single word sung, in different tones, the one that gives the album its title. We are in the territories of Cat Rapes Dog and Philadelphia, two of the most important bands that brought ebm to embrace Dark-Electro. Bone-filled melody, a single note that sequesters, some work in finding the right sonic texture, and then off we go: the spearhead is now firmly placed inside our disheveled skull....
5 - Lost
The Old Scribe rejoices to know that eNiB is no longer part of Echoes of Silence: if this fifth episode had originated with the Roman lineup, it would have stolen stylings, angles, and haircuts towards many of Coldwave's moral proclivities. Instead, Filippo travels alone, wonderfully, in a schematic track, at once clear and sombre, where the lightness of losing nothing has nothing to do with loneliness. To be convincing he limits phrasing and finds a loop that if you pay attention will remind you of Enola Gay. It is from these small details that you make an artist....
6 - Devourer
Darkness where are you? Were you afraid you had been cast aside? Impossible: desolation demands and demands presence. Here they are, here, as in an OMD track, able to have Pop feathers, to make people dance, while tears sink in. The only track on the album that experiments with multiple musical genres, for a truly remarkable end result.
7 - Intruder (Feat. DonTToxique)
Elaborate, with a beginning that seems to recall the opening scene of the movie The Day After, the song is an ebm experiment lightened of the expressive sonic drama, but not of the suggestiveness that the female vocalist (what a surprise, let's admit it!) expresses in a charming way: on a system on which Depeche Mode would have built an entire album (poor things, eh yes...), the artist plays with flashes, advances in experimentation, deploys more loops and brings the music to be a balcony full of chrysanthemums. It was necessary to give the vibes continents without temporal boundaries, and the track seems to be a foggy ray that started from the 1980s to slap, softly, all the time that separated it from the present...
8 - Come to Me
Excuse me: for Berlin 1994? Am I okay if I continue on this musical track? The pearl, the black sheep of the Biagioni family is a poet with beautiful nerves, the child of a city without a wall and without dignity anymore. We are right in the German urban agglomeration-Alberto Camerini would love this track... Metric, robotic, with tight boundaries, it takes your breath away through an obsessive and disordered dance. Still doubts about this album? Come on, be reasonable...
9 Savour
The Old Scribe used small crowds in the 1990s to dance to slow songs with an intimate propensity for speed, to defenestrate whimsy and simplicity. eNiB does the same: dragging without having the need for powerful and majestic drumming, it concentrates energy to develop a mental prison within which to build a form of addiction. Evocative, compulsive, exhausting, the latest sonic appointment seems to celebrate horror without making it easy for it: let it go dance elsewhere! Which, in this context, is a resoundingly good thing!
Thus we bid farewell to a work that, good writers would say, has an international scent. Certain that success does not kiss the deserving, the wish is that there are souls who may stumble upon this record: even in suffering there is a smile and a beautiful gray rainbow...
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