My Review: Iamnoone - The Joy Of Sorrow

Iamnoone - The Joy Of Sorrow

Whether it is confusion or clarity that generates an oxymoron such as the title of this album is not known and perhaps it is better: with such doubt turbulent skies full of dancing, with salt on the wounds as mischievous smiles spread and go, nomadic and unhappy, on a dance hall where hypnosis is the Italian duo's trademark, although many things have changed (for the better) to make these twelve compositions a farewell to the past and a wet embrace of the future.

Philippe and Seth reveal an osmosis that astounds, with a compactness that cannot fail to go viral when one has the illusion that their ‘old’ beauty and depth is still evident.

But there is no doubt that the propensity is to create a circle of sonic desirability that knows how to be a gentle invocation to share these truly intense pearls, which fly in the meanders of a turbulence educated by an intelligent use of electronics, in which the guitars seem to have disappeared and massive doses of harmony are encountered that nourishes the joy of pain...

The freshness, the hypotheses elaborated in the minds of the two, the blackish incendiary instincts, the pleasant toxicity of pressing rhythms, the lyrics that scrutinise and hold back, stacks of granitic motions to pick up the corpse of musical genres now consolidated by precariousness and an increasingly minimal sense of resistance, make all this something necessary.

Iamnoone become a pair of volatile dinosaurs, and specifically two argentavis magnificens, capable of grabbing the corpses of our brains and bringing them into the atrium of their artistic work in the South American mountains, for an alcoholic and robust mass, with rituals that make the soul sweat and the emotions stir. Darkness found itself inevitably changed: the band does not intend to give advice but, as wise art should, lights a candle on the debris and sows doubts, invites us to follow this dancing ship into trajectories that turn time into a frightened spinning top, with class.

Musically, it is often on the side of an ebm that is never exaggerated, with ancient coldwave flows that make the whole thing yet another forced yet perfectly oiled marriage.

As for the singing, it becomes more melodic, cadenced, and vibrant, with, in addition, the ability to better juggle vocal registers.

But then there is the undeniable feeling of a lethal study of the shrunken dust that has become thoughts, with loneliness and sadness united in a spring dress without a zip, with the desire to bounce through truly magnetic synths these two elements increasingly linked to inevitable decline.

The Eighties fall before this intellectual progression.

The useless sounds of the Nineties are put on the bench.

The topics of the last two decades remain, but the mode of expression changes, deviates and moves swiftly towards the removal and annihilation of those heavy chains that were imitation and the inability to generate fresh air in the groove.

Can one be fresh with death painted in the notes? If you wrote this record, certainly: and it is amazement welded with rays that smell of heavy metal.

Short introductions, the essential body of the tracks quickly identified and then off with nuances, dry arrangements and the sense of rush that never leaves us, which make this work a cloud not yet able to be considered toxic but certainly dangerous: there are many people who fear dark beauty and here they will not get a moment's respite. 

One feels the pleasantness of the presence that is not merely descriptive of a recent past, as, as the listening continues, one imagines the whole thing being born in that very instant and in doing so we find ourselves before the miracle of self-judgment.

The Joy Of Sorrow becomes a mystery that seeks an interview, an increasingly rigged dice game of an impudent and vibrant pyramid, with Sin being invited by the two to throw down the aces. Those of the musicians are full of mathematics and an incandescent pentacle, adept at directing the gaze towards its five points and placing themselves in the twelve tracks, to cover them with magic and a dense atmosphere.

Relationships, time, space, and intellectual magnets that seem to be uncompromisingly expendable, make for radiant listening, even if there is no doubt that the echoes that dwell in the head will vibrate those who hold our destiny in their hands.

It is essential to give prominence to the refrains that often reveal Seth's concentric imagination, faithful in its power and ability to give melodic traits a heightened and propulsive sense: his bass is a treatise on chemistry applied to Philippe's melodic fantasy, to meet in the ballroom of a party where lonely souls weep and dance to the sound of these songs, to immerse truth within the denial of a future and where, incidentally, nihilism has nothing to do with it.

Faithful to Andreas and Suzy Herrmann's Cold Transmission as in a pact in which mutual esteem flows into a party in the German black forest, this combo transfers the Italian film made of sweat and disenchantment inside the proverbial Germanic pragmatic sense, to generate an unhappy happening in a delightful way, with the aggravation of songs that will remain warriors in time, precisely in this one that seems to prefer fall and incapacity. 

Everything is a corrupted echo, the senses put to the bar full of plastic and busy transistors, the rhythm that allows no pause and the music is a blueberry factory that settles on the lips of these compositions, in a sensual manifesto that makes eroticity a pleasant ordeal.

Fertile, galvanised by their trajectories on the candelabra of a clandestine day, they magnetise the now sterile post-punk with saline solutions that give that blackish brio by which they have always been fascinated. On this album they transform the potential into an elaborate scene where Fura dels Baus performs with them in holding back the darkness and turning it into a new stone to be thrown from the centre of the stage.

Powerful, winking, seductive, the last act of this sphere seeks chalk claws, with their attention turned to the perimeter where they sit solutions to be activated: they do it brilliantly, forging character with these conversations that salivate and spit out life to be consumed with simplicity, casting a paradoxical fear on them as, for real, one should not be fooled by the luminous games of these keyboards, because the best joke is disguised as misleading simplicity

Now let us dance and descend to the slippery floor to sip absinthe and Fernet Branca...

Song by Song

1 - In Fear

The stuttering, unstoppable Fear is the one to whom the two have given the task of opening the rainbow of uprisings: a gentle farewell from their outstanding Together Alone of 2023, to grant the illusion that their path would be similar. But no. Just listen to how the track's progression leads to a faux-sunny opening, as never before...

2 - This Is Forever

The old Clock Dva and Front 242 might whisper the opening pattern, but then it's flight, progression, a pressing of life with an eternity that leans on the lapidary bass and the vertigo of wisely circular electronics, while the voice seems to enunciate and preside over the decline of loss, which is nothing but the characteristic of this actuality destined to live in dying eternity...

3 - This, Fourth And Fifth

Partially neurotic, pulsating and magnetic, in reality this track lives above Olympus, in a day in which the old guitar seems to pop out to then allow Seth's fingers to be those of a merciless blacksmith. 

4 - MFM

Think of Kraftwerk as infants, simple and dreamy: take them to a clearing with a modern computer and the old Italian melodic genuflection, and here is this cancer on the neck looking for a break, without finding it: everything is a pressing march, an agitated whisper that shakes the soul in the night without lights...

5 - Soulless

The experimentation continues, the one that precedes the actual song: it is a feverish symptom, it is splitting, shaking and then becoming a magnet. Ancient hints of Giorgio Moroder and Cher in the musical part come forward and then it's a crossbow in the refrain, with notes like mental precipices, where the melody proves capable of connecting the Seventies and the present day.

6 - Ask The Wind

Bringing together a piano, a breath of wind and a sabre-rattling bass that Hooky's old fogey couldn't reproduce any more is a killer indeed, then a satin robe descends and crosses the air with Philippe's singing that hides the secret of its elegance very well as it seems to suggest questions rather than determine beauty with the decadent sound that lives in his torn uvula

7 - The Age Of Sadness

When the two insist on looping, in the adjacent areas of the arrangement this temple of enchantments and traps comes to life, one ends up whistling the polemical flow of sadness, which has become a boulder. But the ballistic prowess lies in the opening verses that push the mind to focus, to make interpretation something useless: better to travel in the images of these magnetic sounds, to use the lyrics as a truthful mirror of the dirty game of existence. 

8 - Fever

They take us by the hand with Italian disco-dance fragments from the Eighties, then put them in oil and wait for the sprouts of this keyboard that traces pins so dear to Orchestra Manoeuvres in The Dark. You fly, you stop in the clouds, and then it's beating cadence, it's totally feverish nocturnal seduction...

9 - The Labyrinth Is In My Mind

Here they are, the two from the early days, generous wizards inside bloody needles and threads: the darkest track is the only moment in which the old steps seem to rise again. Pure illusion: the bass with its martial procedure is enough to show how the past is a window to which they no longer look. The feeling remains, however, that like an affectionate encyclopaedia everything can still be studied and proposed, with some exciting mutation...

10 - 99 Angels

An opening song that could also close it, and that fortifies the fluid movements of dark textures, 99 Angels is the stroke of genius simplified: a bone structure well turned by ebm petals manages to devastate adjacent musical genres to become the mirror of what Iamnoone are today...

11 - Purity

Romanian-German songwriter Michael Cretu appears, playing with synths, but the two Italians suspend the notes to bring them back in movement, subtle and simple, in the refrain, with the vocal part blessing what resists wrapped in a white cloak...

12 - Pain

The unexpected becomes an act of glory, a subject of study and a remarkable force: Pain is the future of a musical past that is now nailed under the dust. Iamnoone revitalise, lubricate that period when food and drink were found in a few notes. Inclined to an artificial insemination of the time that was, it becomes a magnetic, reddish, truly unpredictable leave-taking, to allow joy to give pain the right measure of tireless punishment…

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

2nd October 2024

Iamnoone:

Philippe Marlat

Seth Dagodeus 

Music Label:

Cold Transmission

https://iamnoone1.bandcamp.com/album/the-joy-of-sorrow

My Review: Platonick Dive - Take a deep breath

 Platonick Dive - Take a deep breath

Small perceptions define the depth of a work, whether driven by instinct or not it matters little. Here, then, is a series of lights that comfort the vision of it all.

The right preface for a complex work, rooted in the purity and splashes that refresh the current world panorama of three musical genres in debt to oxygen, sees the band Platonick Dive in the narrative fabric that bypasses comprehension as it is filled with ascending textures, while also knowing how to descend to the height of the listener's inhibited reception. Songs that lead us to feel the wind beneath the waves, to perceive the embrace of neighbouring but still distant worlds. The three musicians paint the stage like diamonds to be transferred to sound, imbued with a wise and warm scenic perspective. In certain moments, the Old Scribe glimpses ancient gems from Wishplants with their mammoth Coma or Australian artist Laura with the unreachable Radio Swan Is Down, an album that the Italian band probably does not know, but whose importance they have been able to feel: how much magic is there in all this?

A trio that spreads its idea of contemplation, dream, emotion, in the vortex of a pilgrim's glide within harmonies and melodies with clear ideas, developing continuous metamorphoses with changes of rhythm, the intelligent use of electronics not at the centre but at the service of a collective sense of the individual parts.

A work that does not require improvisation and genuineness but, even more importantly, a meticulous study through which to make the compositions not a theatre but a silent journey, in which what is adjacent and nebulous intersects in the cylinder of a truly powerful need.

Post-rock guides, creates visions, but without denying the need to range in experimental games that include the most delicate shoegaze and an alternative (especially in the drumming) that allows formulas full of variety, ending up seducing and making the listening experience that encounter with the wind beneath the water, as stated above.

Almost entirely instrumental, with the impression that the vocals are hidden out of necessity but able to arrive with refinement and softness. 

There are battles of sounds, predominantly slow rhythms, often syncopated, and a prairie of arpeggios that engage the bass and drums to create the perfect cohesion, given the impressive amount of guitar textures always full of energy and poetry.

The great consolation comes from not being a masterpiece but an even more nourishing album, in that it knows how to hide part of its own face, and this constitutes an irresistible, important, and definitively more incisive fact than the masterpiece, word and deed given with too much haste and no longer credible.

The breath that is used in this situation is what is needed to feel transported, to listen again and again, as the key lies in the amount of alchemy developed so as not to repeat itself. There are dramas, sadness, nostalgia and mood riots in Take a Deep Breath, in a consequential circuit that lives in the vicinity of a sound projection that marries images in accumulation and never in transit.

As if to say: nothing is lost, but everything becomes a piggy bank that swells and makes a smile the real gain of this experience. Twelve mute stories (in appearance) that know how to come out of the tail end of fairy tales intimately devoted to solidarity: in certain episodes, one really thinks that the band is capable of writing a new language, reinforcing the writer's conviction that this is a wonderful appointment with a series of novelties that are perhaps not easy to come by.

With decisive personality, the songs present deviate a great deal from their beginnings, and in this passage of time there are clear signs of awareness and strength: it is enough to approach the listening purifying selfishness and the erroneous exercise of comparison to notice how the brushstrokes are only the marvellous deception of wooden bundles falling at the foot of the water. Robustness is more in the character than in the sound: here is the Post-Rock of the late 1990s reminding us how just a few notes, not an endless web of chords, are enough to elevate our contact with poetry.

How much benefit comes from these minutes in which we become ears that see and mouths that suggest escape? A great deal: the fan of emotions finds itself in the vicinity of thoughts, in an idyll that becomes a generating force of new impulses, gravitating in the peaceful cohabitation of dreams and horizons, yes, because the oneiric plane seems to have dressed up to come out of these persuasive notes.  The production is good, although there are some imperfections and a few small errors in the dynamics of the volumes, but believe me these are wonderful elements, which make you realise how the Live dimension is the most congenial and where errors are smiles from the goddess of music. The decision to give the minutes little chance to linger is remarkable: boredom never appears and the vitality of some solutions that come close to classical music and certain Moby and Air remixes makes the whole thing a vitaminic statement of the richness that lives in these tracks.

Ranging from the nineties to the present day, this wind beneath the skin of water plays to hide, to protect, develops obscene beauty making us rich, almost with shame. Very Italian in its production and rhythms, English in its development, this album offers multiple reflections: the sense of anticipation, emphasis, joy and those sun-filled tears that melt away fears. Tension is an important part: these tales seek out places by creating them, crowding them with sounds that range as technique, as variations and the happily deposited entrance into an album that sounds like a construction site open to the public.  It will not have success: little bad, because that would be their undoing, it will, instead, have the capacity to be a solvent, an emotional shock and a vasodilator of the senses for those who from listening will feel that they can connect with these remarkable musicians, to be able to feel that uniqueness that Platonick Dive certainly have...

Come on, let's dive into the twelve waves: we may not learn to swim, but we will know the smell of a truly incandescent encounter...

Song by Song 

1 - Intro

An electronic turbulence plunges us into a resounding deception: nothing foreshadows what is to come, the guitars, the contained explosions. But it is precisely this element of confusion that creates the sweetest snub: an intro that sounds like a perfect intrusion with its ascending algorithms, with electronics that make your mouth open wide in amazement...

2 - Carpet Ceiling

Here comes the butterfly of a six-string plotting flights in the void, supported by a swirling and military drumming, echoes of the Leech beloved by the Old Scribe induce the first tidal wave: a lullaby that seems acoustic in intentions, but able to be a warm set of cables...

3 - Lighthouse

Moby seems to be intrigued, in the first few seconds: there are points of contact with Play, but then it's a heron seducing the lower zones of the instincts, this molecule coming out of the six-string, the change of rhythm, voices in the background as if they were flying in the Tuscan sky. And these are points of contact with the leader of Durutti Column: the progression of the chords is pure catharsis

4 - Anesthetic Analgesic

It's night, it's dread, it's a glide on the guitar neck that disorients, the bass that floods the waves and the drums that give order, for a song that is a set of splashes and stop-and-go only hinted at: when modern poetry manages to present itself, as in this case, it feels like Truffaut's films, rich and settled for many years to come.  The plot has the face of the wettest Post-Rock, close to conspicuous tears, thanks to an effect that surrounds the listening and a ferocious loop that settles the blow...

5 - Naked Valley

Rover takes notes, like Bernard Butler: here the notes are streams and an almost invisible pain touches these children of the Adorable band, when shoegaze was an endless mine. A film, a quiver and a bass that slides to the feet, a truly remarkable creation...

6 - Too Beautiful To Die Too Wild To Live

Here it is, the diadem, the core of every score that enters the zone of heavenly beauty: emphatic, hermetic, blessed by its zones that seem to need the outposts of the song form. The splendour of stanzas and refrains without voices is a pure emotion...

7 - Interlude

The door opens slowly, like an interlude with delicate brushstrokes, a flicker that reaches the fingertips, a few seconds that know how to create tension: anachronostic, perverse thanks to its long, black dress on a sunny day. They are fragments of sound at the bottom of the sea...

8 - Falls Road

The Old Scribe has no hesitation: in this track lives maturity, study, algebraic ascensions of tensions in search of a perfection that the band knows how to create. Everything flows in the delicate mechanism of new pages that open second after second, displacing, generating intensity until the roll: from that moment it is a pen of light that writes history, a shining, glorious track that deserves the highest point of the podium...

9 - Blue Hour

Imagine Peter Gabriel on holiday in Tuscany, searching for faces and streets, to find peace of sight. Suddenly, Blue Hour arrives and it is a night ride that ignites the dream, the will to be there and not to flee. The track is a sphere of catharsis held soaking in sweetness, in the episodes of a crossroads that sees guitar, bass and drums speaking the same language, with roles that end up being a calendar of sound on the rise

10 - Santa Monica

The beginning is surprising, surprising, offering an unfamiliar side of the band, which seems to be waiting for the right moment to bite the listener with an electronic incipit of remarkable workmanship: simple but well done.

But no: Santa Monica is a future projection of the band, less tied to the musical genres they love and perform, rather a probing of what is to come in their curious souls. Perfect for afternoons when vices seek space, the song plays with graft and almost imperceptible references. A gem that will become a jewel when the listener has learned to see multiple capacities...

11 - Struggles & Feelings

Fifteen opening seconds: like waiting for rain with two notes and then finding yourself with a cry falling from the sky, a distortion between the reverb that kneads the throat, the drumming that shakes and the tension that visits the arpeggios. The probe's strategy is to have the memory of encounters. So does this piece, which extends the scope to generate well-intended turmoil. The rides of U2's The Edge, if it were using these effects, would know how to stay forever. The Italian band takes the oxygen and surrounds it with perfection...

12 - Tribeca

The conclusion is a toast with guitars that can remind us of The Cranberries' second album and certain solutions by Matt Johnson of The The, but then it's all in the bag for these guys who end with the most epic, poignant song, putting sand rings in the rhythm changes, a lively melody that leads to dancing and a plot that seems built to close their concerts. Then: the surprise of a crooning, male, to generate the ideal combination to emphasise what has just been heard. Where Post-Rock doesn't dare, these magnificent Platonick Dive do...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

13th September 2024

https://platonickdive.bandcamp.com/album/take-a-deep-breath

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