My Review: Are You Real? - Unicorn

 Are You Real? Unicorn

‘In the real you risk suffocating, in the unreal you risk losing yourself’ - Mario Andrea Rigoni

We start with a poet, writer, essayist and inhabitant of the stars, of dreams, of contact with the intimate: a perfect way to start approaching this aural astonishment that leads to a wingspan into the territory of confidence that becomes courage.

And it is a moving spectacle to see that the protagonist is a fantastic and imaginative animal, the best ally of white-coloured dreams, which welcome flight and reality to emphasise the movements in which freedom and ingenuity travel side by side.

This is how we find ourselves writing about the discographic comeback of Andrea Liuzza, aka Are You Real, after five years of willing and able distance from putting himself out there. He does so with the slowness, the gentle atmosphere of a movement close to sleep, to cerebral activity, to passion for an illuminating encounter such as, in its specific truth, is that of the unicorn, an emblem that resists all change.

The structure of the piece reveals an almost vanished talent, which is that of giving voice to simplicity, surrounding it with that technological modernity that fortifies it and enables it to connect the antiquity of the human being and the mode of today. This is where the magic of this composition is revealed: not only does it take the oneiric aspect on a stroll through time, but it also translates the symbols, the impetuses, the movements that employ the strategy of a song form reduced to a minimum: the verse is also the refrain, we find ourselves before an undeclared structural apparatus in which the instrumental part acts as a connector to emotional impulses that are then welded together by the voice and singing of Gintsugi, an artist who plays her trump card. Which is not to overpower the heard that precedes her presence but to become a further accompanying process, in the stratosphere, amidst traffic lights and trails of lights that expand the already majestic figure of the unicorn.

It touches, it makes us reflect, it transports to a rarefied and secluded place the lack of a deafening rhythm, making sound the friend of intelligence: nothing is exaggerated, decomposed or rude, as Andrea Liuzza, in his artistic direction, writes a piece that expands with its hints, its movements and its precise arithmetic, only to leave, in the trails of its words, light atoms that become imprints of the soul.

In spite of the background mentioned by Andrea himself, the Old Scribe feels his writing is mature and free from conditioning. This can be deduced from the use of voices, from the suspensions, from the gentle tension, which clearly do not have the timbre and appearance of those artists he himself named.

Here lives all the depth, intensity, freedom of which the animal itself has been a symbol, prophet and companion for millennia: Unicorn lives on its own, without really being the product of musical listening because it is capable and aware of its own direction, of a polite instinctiveness that caresses listening.

The nature of the dreamer is to have allies (spiritual harmony first), and this is what is experienced during these minutes of listening. 

There are ideals that travel and pass through sleep, to be history, path and light, creating wonder and excitement, in slow motion, which is the true wonder of this composition. Difficulties, doubts, scepticism, indisposition, are factors that the unicorn knows, dissolving them with its soft naturalness.

Are You Real translates, explains, makes this legend become real and directs it towards our auditory system to then create images that, in parallel, are able to maintain contact with reality.

A psychedelic shimmer, in a soundscape that seems to start from a splinter from the sixties, given the emphasis that the singing can unleash. And then the notes, the few but well-structured chords manage to create an emotional hourglass, a singing that becomes feather and brick in its brief circuit.

A musical episode that creates compromises, impulses, but above all induces introspection, as an offer and not as a request: a courtesy, a kindness, a soft handshake that turns into an embrace, thanks to a levitation held between suspension and momentum.

When one believes there will be a rhythmic deviation, Unicorn becomes a ray of sunshine, ungovernable, that does not run away but confirms, and confirms, and affirms its mane of notes that become fixed in an inevitable falling in love.

Theatrical, hypnotic, exhaustive, this gem contains splashes of New World Music and Ambient, without falling into the temptation of a sterile imitation: it is just one of the entrances, of the ways it has to erudite itself first. It seems to have no end, to be swaggering but, like a drop in the wind, it climbs the Unicorn to experience. New magic, believe the Old Scribe....

There is then a sonic quota of the 1990s, those that generated electronic ramifications are certainly more evident, but Andrea escapes, runs, holes up in his dream and draws a disobedience that, if grasped, makes one free to listen to the track in soft autonomy, without conditioning.

The present day is represented by a production that fixes the passing of the years and colours it. Therefore, a video and a book of 50 plates could not be missing to close the circle, the cohesion of this truly authoritative twinning: time and magic...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld 

Salford

5th December 2024

https://open.spotify.com/track/1mr5FxOURGz2v32rVULGoE?si=ib12mxVGSy270daHy7jGzQ