Like inside a mirror. On one side the artist, on the other the critic. It is a mirror game. A sending back and forth of suggestions, echoes, signs. Both on the way towards the imaginary.
(Gerardo Pedicini – Dentro lo Specchio)
This quote is my starting point to approach the review of “Hard Boiled”, an album produced and played by me for Liburia Records – giving me the opportunity to investigate the hidden reasons in my music after reflecting on these words.
Listen to the album while reading the text.
When I started playing and recording the very first notes of “Hard Boiled,” I was coming from a deep, confused period, in which I perceived the music in a moment of deep creative stasis. The idea of starting to work on this project was born spontaneously. However, I had no intention of making a prediction. At that moment, music in general seemed above all a decoration of emptiness. We were and we are, unfortunately, surrounded by music that is sometimes terrible and not linked to any poetic or narrative predisposition. Much more worrying than in the past. As a musician, composer, and artist, I couldn’t agree with that. Music is closely tied to a cultural attitude, a research that serves to raise the bar for humanity. Or at least that’s how I grew up.
So the idea of “Hard Boiled” came from nothing; nothing was prepared in advance. This “nothing” should not be confused with emptiness. Nothing is like a Pandora’s box that, once the lid is opened, can only reveal wonders, making you breathe your inner desert.
From this nothingness, which is above all an oblivion, emerge all the “benevolent demons” that we have met in our approach to music and art. These demons are the most important friends that we have in our forgotten memory.
In the official linear notes of “Hard Boiled,” I mentioned some of my personal demons. Joyce, Lynch, Carmelo Bene, Miles, Mingus, Zappa, Jaco, just to name a few, but there are many others. As you can see, they are not only part of the world of music but also intertwined with other fields of culture and art. These sorts of beneficial demons have only contributed to revealing to me precise and, at the same time, immense paths within my artistic imagination, and in my conception of what it means for me to make art.
The word “demons” could mislead the understanding of what I mean. They raised us and at the same time led us into this oblivion, which is the crucial point of a composition or a creative idea, naturally free from preconceptions, pre-analysis, and pre-decisions.
The “benevolent demons” have the ability to touch the darkest strings of your soul, turn them inside out, changing your perspective of the world, transforming your certainties into doubts, amplifying your fragility. Simply put, it makes you a real human being—a human being who can feel. In a strange transfiguration relationship, the demon is thus transformed into an angel.
Most of the essential cultural figures are no longer with us at this time. What remains are their works and teachings, which are immortal. But the most significant difficulty is that something or someone is turning them into museum pieces. Thus, they lose their immediacy in the social fabric. I believe that for my generation, and certainly for the one before and the one immediately after mine, the presence of significant figures in the artistic field has fostered a strong cultural awareness. The world of art, in its broadest sense, contained and confronted that part of social horror that we were forced to witness.
But I can’t find someone who can now have the explosive force of a Mingus, the careful social vision of Sting’s “Russians”, or the lucid and moving dialectic of sound and language of someone like Kurt Cobain. These three examples contain a great sea of artistic and communicative possibilities, which moved minds and souls in the old century.
This brings me to my frequently asked question. Which I also do to all of you:
Who are the demons of this time?”
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