My Review: Max Maffia - Frammenti dietro le quinte

 Max Maffia - Frammenti dietro le quinte

“It’s all the sea’s fault” - Max Maffia

The sea, this precipice of depth, both calm and rough, ends up in the fingertips of an elegant probe called Max Maffia, a humble listener of those flows who, in a silent trance, transforms messages into stories full of harmony and sweetness, as sometimes not even the gazes of love can do.

The artist from Salerno puts ten years of paintings on record, between medieval and classical silhouettes, with pop that watches fascinated and where the blues, the fado and elements of ancient music meet under the waves until they rise onto a stage where dances and breaths are exposed, one after the other, in a silent show that has the intention of making the listeners blind…  They are plots that push bodies to navigate the poetic paths of ancient attitudes and that current events have now refused to live. Precisely for this reason this collection seems like the perfect anachronistic spark capable of surprising, enchanting, to close the hourglass of time by rejecting modern incursions.

They are pieces that have been part of theatrical performances, commercials, like a slingshot that draws the story told by novels and stories, as well as fables, which here, in these furrows, seem to form a new interpretative dress. The history of Italian and foreign literature is caressed, to enter, without hesitation, into Olympus where a harp welcomes these notes: the goddess of music cries with a silk handkerchief in her hands and kisses the author from Salerno because, if perfection exists, it lies in making the listener surrender through temporal and physical journeys.  How much Maffia has grown is evident: no longer just an excellent guitarist but a director of melodies, poignant, elegant, full of holds like ivy willing to reach the infinite, to bring, in a more complete mode, his emotional kaleidoscope, sensitizing himself, moving within a new artistic figure that makes the composition a farewell (hopefully definitive) from the song form. As in this ensemble we really have the feeling that his idea of ​​composition has come closer to primitive musical expressions. A rich and uniform list of expressions, rhythms, changes of direction, lead us to affirm that it is an orchestra diligently attentive to following the directives of a maestro who knows the cell of the story, with the soft attention towards the direction of each movement.    

And all this is already theatre, a show that truly comes from the sea to get under the skin.

Max creates personal bonds with dancers, photographers, with the idea of ​​an air that wanders towards attention and waiting, to perpetuate a path where the hints, the buzzes and the slowness are the main cardinal points of his journey in the water of notes.

An intimate collection, a dense reasoning on how to translate feelings and ideas, a capturing of the depth of the sea to make it take a turn on the keys, on the strings, on a vessel of feathers to thin the roar and make friends with silence because, truly, this is music that comes out of the void so as not to scream and to transform the thought into the twin brother of the heart.  Where does imagination begin? What is the point of telling the moods starting from the foam of the waves and the scent of those indispensable particles? The answer is in these sixteen compositions: Max searches for and above all finds himself having in his mental womb an extraordinary sensitivity capable of decoding sounds and turning them into absorbent paper and, in doing so, takes us to the dawn of fantasy, among the drools of the obscene, making it useless to consecrate everything with vivid beauty.

There are clear signs of mysticism, contemplation and a great basic culture: knowing how to linger on the sound and make it participate in frenzy with the reins pulled is synonymous with balance and clear ideas.

All the pieces are short and compact, incapable of presenting banality, skilled, instead, in welding the effervescence with an expressive tentacular design so as not to let the beauty wander in the dark.  In doing so, Maffia fixes the light with the spotlight that shows on the stage of his intention nuances that require study. As if it were classical music but capable of tribalism, of atmospheric chimes close to World, with the ability to make ambient a precious friend, without giving up particles of electronics.

You end up seeing the seasons of life in the apartments of the heart, virgin, pale, ready to be snuggled up from the splendid cover by Alessandra Cammarano, which is nothing but the stimulus to push the eyes to shrink, just like all the notes on the pentagram of this work that, step by step, offers in a perceptible way the river of bubbles eager for attention…

When you then get to listening to the songs that were part of a show on Collodi's Pinocchio, you have the perception that those characters, to be credible, really needed the help of these sound magics…

What about Babette's Feast by Karen Blixen? They are endless shivers, an emphasis that never stops, to bring us into a very sweet tremor.  The main skill of this work does not consist in creating photographs but in preparing the elements to be filmed, giving them an order, discipline and a lot of affection: they are the first heartbeats of a human warmth that opens the gaze even before being seen, generating magic and a long line of considerations.

There is no need for voices or songs as everything is a prayer of the soul and not of the throat, to condense in the place of attention a landslide from which to be reborn. Not music, not songs, but a gentle and curious universe that shapes itself, blessing our breath with secret turbulences although never segregated, never victims.

What to add except that we are in a swim in which staying afloat is only the best way to waste this opportunity: we dive into these fragments, hiding in the wings, but without missing the appointment with gratitude, because Max Maffia has performed a pagan miracle, however I have no doubt that somewhere in the sky the Gods applaud all this…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

8th September 2024

https://maxmaffia.bandcamp.com/album/frammenti-dietro-le-quinte