Energumeni

ENERGUMENI :: ENERGUMENI :: DOUBLE LP ON VINYL :: SUSSIDIARIA / RIZOSFERA-NUKFM :: 2025 :: TWO EDITIONS AVAILABLE

1 – TRADITIONAL DOUBLE VINYL EDITION (SUSSIDIARIA)
2 – LIMITED EDITION OF 50 COPIES IN DOUBLE VINYL WITH CD-R AND 16-PAGE BOOKLET (RIZOSFERA-NUKFM)

**********

PAGAN PEOPLE OF THE PO VALLEY by Vittore Baroni

Let’s say it right away: due to distant kinships and ancient artistic alliances, it is both my fault and my merit to have brought the two bearded giants together in person. Thus, it falls to me to bear the burden and honor of scribbling a few superfluous introductory lines. This commentary is not essential, as the bare tracks of the double album already eloquently spell out the sonic trajectories that converge here in a rustic manner—ranging from free rock moods, weird jazz clots, no wave tantrums, and inventions of instant freeze-dried songwriting glossolalia, to hieratic laments of lost exotic civilizations and assorted rule-free game pieces. The lament of the tenor before the final whistle.

Internalizing expressions of restless and undisciplined improvisation, the two multifaceted Emilians—both with four decades of musical militancy behind them (Marmo e le Forbici di Manitù on one side, and En Manque D’Autre, Acid Folk Alleanza, Groove Safari, Impresa Gottardo, etc. on the other)—sublimate their energies and passions headlong. They shift from Canterbury-esque calembours, all tears and patches on raw canvas, to quarrelsome motorik rhythms and Faustian grumbles (almost like a lost album of the most esoteric krautrock), with the Chris Cutler lesson well-hidden beneath their shared affection for the Associates (as good children of the ‘80s). They weave enlightened astral conjunctions of styles with ungraceful smirks and jeers. Traces of fried gnocchi on the Moog.

In the homemade rehearsal room, amidst wary feline tribes and silent buzzards soaring over the fields, like two sprites in a pod far from the maddening crowd, Manitù and Taver accumulate cave-dwelling philosophies and procedural paradoxes (abstractions disguised as songs, and vice versa). There is no antagonism between good and bad music, but rather between useless and necessary music—if only to soothe that underlying pain, that accumulated malaise of eons that keeps one awake at night, as if storytelling could make one feel more real and fit to uphold some misunderstood cause, caught between sad Catholic-communists and cunning turbo-capitalists. Independent bodies and minds weaned and rooted in the Po Valley, fortified by elephant mosquito bites, scanning violet skies at dusk in anticipation of alien saviors. With the Klingons, we make *klang*.

In a self-induced state of agitation and intentionally unconscious intent, the two, like good-natured ogres, have programmatically decided to lose themselves in overlapping layers and stratifications of aleatory automatic compositions. Peaceful and dazzled brutes inspired by the muse Euterpe, stubbornly intolerant of the prevailing Asinine Intelligence, they grope their way through the fog that no longer exists, conquered and subdued by that mysterious groove that serendipitously appeared between them one night. They are willing to put themselves on the line again and always, like disbelieving shamans, shouting and throwing punches at other dimensions of knowledge. To inevitably lose themselves in the sounds, here and now, before (as late as possible) the time comes to *pighêr i tvaiô* (a.k.a. to rise to heaven).