Deadburger - Electro-rock turned avant-garde

Florence's Deadburger are one of the bands on the Italian underground scene that have most successfully combined rock's communicative power with experimentation, "youth" music with high culture, managing to tie it all together with a wide range of art forms, from literature to poetry, from theatre to the visual arts, displaying a capacity for constant renewal and an uncommon musical culture. Over their twenty-year career they have always managed to improve by changing, to evolve without looking back; with the exception of their second album, each of their records is better than the one before.

The story of the "Panino di morto" begins in 1996 with their appearance at Arezzo Wave with the track "Italiano Cyborg", meant to depict the new Berlusconi-era Italian, "half man, half television". This track, which would later appear on their debut album, Deadburger, in 1997, already maps out the direction taken on their early albums: an energetic, frenetic industrial-electro-rock sound that was experiencing a kind of boom in those very years.

The reception is very good - in fact, it could even be said that the album achieved a decent commercial success. Good reviews in specialist magazines and even in the mainstream press, contract offers and various concert bookings, comparisons to bands like Nine Inch Nails, Chemical Brothers or Prodigy. Comparisons that were largely off the mark, according to Deadburger themselves, since of the three bands mentioned only the first was actually known to them.

But the truth isn't quite what was described back in the Nineties; the debut album marks the beginning of what could be called the first phase of Deadburger, an electro-rock phase comprising their first three albums, which is certainly praiseworthy but still immature compared to the band's later work. This phase seems to have been a brief but necessary passage to go through before Deadburger truly understood what their goals should be. The singer on the first two albums, Vittorio Canovai, was probably not the right fit for their music, and Vittorio Nistri and his bandmates' studio experience was still insufficient at the time.

Even so, there are plenty of good ideas on display. For a start, it's one of the very first Italian enhanced CDs, that is, an audio CD paired with a CD-ROM full of videos, lyrics and images. As for the tracks, particularly interesting is the tribute to Pink Floyd on "Piano con quell'acido Eugenio", clearly modelled on "Careful With That Axe, Eugene" ("Ummagumma"). A similar experiment was attempted in 2007 by Verdena with "Non prendere l'acme Eugenio", though with lesser results. "Shell" tackles the subject of oil companies and the damage they cause to people and the environment, "Hacker Dance" reflects Nistri's passion for science fiction, in this case the cyberpunk strand pioneered by William Gibson, while "La donna più bella in città" draws on a short story by Charles Bukowski from "Tales of Ordinary Madness".

In 1999 Deadburger released a short five-track EP, aptly titled Cinque pezzi facili. Having abandoned analogue for digital, armed with their first Mac, Nistri and Casini tried out an experiment they called "electro-matryoshkas". They would take a track, modify it, create loops, isolate fragments from it to build another track born from the previous one but by now entirely different, and so on. In this case, the first "parent" track, or first matryoshka, was "Io sto bene" by Cccp.

Cinque pezzi facili accentuates and pushes to the extreme Deadburger's electro-rock soul, helped along by Paolo Fasati's mixing. But the album certainly doesn't yet showcase what would, years later, become the band's true artistic vision.

An important step in this direction is taken with two subsequent tracks released on two various-artists compilations: "Io non so" (1999), featured on the CD "Rock Sound Italy volume 1", which sets to music a post-apocalyptic poem by Giuliano Mesa, and above all "Antigrammatica" (2000), included on the album "Luther Blissett The Open Pop Star", which features the voice of Piero Cannata, the notorious art "killer" famous for taking a hammer to the foot of Michelangelo's David and for scribbling on a Pollock painting. Cannata's deranged ramblings - recorded at the psychiatric hospital of Montelupo Fiorentino - help make the whole track feel delirious, and while it remains anchored in the electro-rock phase, it foreshadows some of Vittorio Nistri's more recent experiments.

It would take another three years before the next work bearing the Deadburger name. The 2003 album is titled S.t.0.r.1.e and represents the first real turning point in their musical choices. Having abandoned a well-trodden path that could have brought easier success, and little interested in the "Italian Nine Inch Nails" tag they could legitimately have claimed, after a long break full of personal experiences that every musician carries with him, Deadburger set off on a new, uphill journey. Vittorio Nistri says of those years: "We had no desire to redo things we'd already done, nor to 'lighten up'. I remember a film where Jack Nicholson tells his father, in a wheelchair, 'I have to leave again, Dad, I don't know why I do it. It's like rivers - if they stop, they disappear.' It was the same for us. We stopped in order not to stop."

The album is made up of 14 tracks, each a separate story in its own right, every one marked by a different colour. Among the standouts are "110 giorni" (did you know that, on average, over a seventy-year lifespan we spend only 110 days making love, as opposed to 180 on the phone and nearly six years in front of the TV?), "Santo elettrone", dedicated to the pseudo-doctor/butcher Walter Freeman, who performed thousands of lobotomies between 1936 and 1967, "Luce", which tackles the boundary between life and death, "Quei bravi ragazzi", dedicated to a group of around 200 young Burmese who in 2000 held off an entire army for almost a year, and "Listino prezzi", about rampant turbo-capitalism.

The album marks a transition between electro-rock and the various experimental records of the following years. The shift, however, didn't go down well with critics: the album was practically ignored by the magazines that had warmly received their first releases. They were wrong: up to that point, this was the most innovative work to bear the Deadburger name, featuring among others Roy Paci as guest trumpeter.

The evolutionary process continues with C'è ancora vita su Marte (2007), probably the first album where Nistri and co. manage to create the music they'd truly had in mind all along. After years of searching, and a transitional phase in which each musician had pursued outside experiences later brought back into Deadburger (among them "In Yonder Garden" by Vittorio Nistri and Antonello Cresti), we arrive at 2007. Four years' wait for a new life, a genuine new beginning. The 2000s were coming to an end, and Deadburger set out to capture their true meaning - a sense of disorientation in an Italy they no longer recognised. Many tracks describe this new Italy 2.0: from "Nibor Dooh" (Robin Hood backwards), dedicated to the famous billionaire so beloved of Italians in the 2000s, to "SBS (Sandro Bondi Syndrome)", from "I veri uomini stanno a Chieti", dedicated to Nicola Cucullo, a devolved barbarian elected mayor of Chieti three times, to the portrait of Italy's clueless new breed of managers detached from real life ("Deposito 423"), right through to the poetic "Come ho fatto a finire in questo deserto", the album's most emblematic title.

It's the portrait of an Italy and an Italian people caught up in a mad dash towards the abyss ("Personal Titanic"), so changed as to be unrecognisable, not only to Italians of thirty years earlier, but perhaps even to the rest of humankind. Anyone who doesn't fall in line is free not to, but must pay a price: loneliness and isolation. These situations are told through the album's extreme fragmentation - twenty-two tracks, brief bursts of sound depicting the disintegration of the 2000s. It's an experiment that pays homage to "The Faust Tapes", the third great album by Faust, borrowing its fragmentary nature but without that same spontaneity or sense of ideas barely sketched out and never developed. Indeed, perhaps unwittingly, it also recalls something of one of the albums from Frank Zappa's freak trilogy, that 1968 "We're Only In It For The Money", which, likewise extremely fragmented, contains around twenty "intelligent units" (as Scaruffi calls them) sketching out various facets of Zappa's generation.

Deadburger too create more than twenty short tracks, attempting to speak of their own generation, their own era, albeit with music far removed from both Zappa and Faust. Musically, the record is very different from its predecessors. First of all, there's a great deal of subtraction at work: every sound or idea deemed unnecessary is discarded, in a drive towards maximum simplification. But the real distinguishing feature is the greater fusion between electronics and rock music - the opposition of earlier years is gone, the two worlds now interpenetrate far more evenly, all through instruments typical of rock, jazz and electronic music.

But if Deadburger's rule is to keep changing and improving, this could only repeat itself in 2013 with the mammoth La fisica delle nuvole. It's not every day you come across a triple CD with such grand ambitions, housed in an elegant grey box containing three CDs plus a hefty 72-page booklet illustrated by comic artist Paolo Bacilieri. Deadburger become a laboratory of ideas and rename themselves Deadburger Factory; in doing so they push much further - there's no trace left of the improvisation or immaturity of their early days. They're now able to casually namecheck Erik Satie, Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Dead Can Dance, Rock In Opposition, moving on to cosmic music, even extreme experimentation, the poetry of Tony Vivona, the painting of Munch, theatre, or the cinema of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Dr. Quatermass". A brilliant work, showing a surprising maturity and establishing Deadburger as genuine Italian avant-garde. Several factors shape this new direction, starting with a boundless love of music and a deep knowledge of its history. But the step forward from the previous C'è ancora vita su Marte is also marked by the abandonment of that album's sense of temporality. La fisica delle nuvole breaks free from the contemporary, and in doing so aims for eternity.

The first of the three CDs is "Puro Nylon 100%", by Alessandro Casini, Vittorio Nistri and Tony Vivona. The title underlines the contrast between the purity of a natural fibre and nylon, an artificial one. In the music, this translates into a clash-encounter between electronic music and music made with classical instruments. Three tracks ("Re", "L'inganno" and "Ciò che la pelle spiega") are reworkings of Erik Satie, twisted and rendered almost unrecognisable by a series of minimal electronic loops. In "Re" we find a five-second sample from Satie's "Socrate" repeated endlessly. The minimal atmosphere is reinforced by a string sextet and clarinet reminiscent of the sound of latter-day Dead Can Dance. These two tracks represent Deadburger's classical soul (meaning here the rediscovery of 20th-century avant-gardes); a handful of notes repeated as though they were the verses of a hermetic poet. "L'Inganno" flows into "Il Poeta", a short but moving poem by Tony Vivona recited by Giorgio Saviane.

The opening track - "1940 Madre" - alternates industrial passages, filtered noise, psychedelic distorted guitars and violas. Electricity and energy surge through the rock of "Obsoleto Blues", a true hymn of gratitude to classic rock/blues, often written off as finished yet revitalised here by the band with unexpected verve. "In Ogni Dove" is a nod to psychedelia, closer to the new strand pioneered by Bark Psychosis than to the classic American variety. It's a track that could have come straight off the masterpiece "Hex". "Oltre" is marked by bass and violin accompanying spoken word, and closes with electronic noise that bleeds into the brief "Slow Emotion". The album closes in style with "Ancora più oltre", featuring artificially reworked vocalisations followed by a magnificent, distant, sad and melancholy cornet played by Nicola Cellai from a score by Vittorio Nistri, who here crafts his own deeply personal tribute to jazzman Don Cherry.

The second album, split between "Microonde" and "Vibroplettri", is, if not the most inspired, certainly the most experimental. The first four tracks are recorded using, as their sole sound source, an ordinary microwave oven, whose sounds are distorted, amplified and reworked. If you've ever wondered what the sound of Munch's The Scream might be, here's your answer. The first track - "La mia vita dentro il forno a microonde" - is Vittorio Nistri's brilliant idea of giving voice to a painting, confirmation that the arts can and must constantly touch and challenge one another. "La strategia del topo" is a pivotal piece on the album; imagine a mouse trapped inside the microwave, trying to escape but doomed to an inevitable end. It's all conveyed through percussion created by banging and striking the oven, Nistri's electronics, and finally the closing noises signalling the rodent's sad demise: genuinely brilliant.

"Magnetron" and "Micronauta" are described by Deadburger as cosmic music made in the kitchen. Again using the sounds of said microwave, they conjure up a spatial atmosphere worthy of Klaus Schulze; the video for Micronauta, through imagery drawing on Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", depicts our anthropological shift from a humanity once in close contact with nature to one growing ever more distant from it. Hence the image of a newborn with a USB stick in place of an umbilical cord, a sign of an evolution whose direction remains unknown to us.

The remaining four tracks are credited to Alessandro Casini, who was struck by the mad idea of playing his guitar not with a normal plectrum but with a "vibroplectrum" - that is, a battery-powered chrome phallus or a Durex clitoral stimulator (this is no joke). The result is four excellent pieces, ranging from the hypnotic, dazed atmospheres of "Il dentista di Tangeri", to the two-minute blues riff with electronic distortion of "Cuore di Rana", to the tribute to early sci-fi cinema in "DR. Quatermass, I Presume", Casini's finest track, through to the brief psychedelic trip of "Arando i campi di vetro".

The third and final CD sees the line-up expand to thirteen members, with guests including Paolo Benvegnù, Enrico Gabrielli (Calibro 35, Afterhours) and Marina Mulopolus (Almamegretta). This time almost every track is sung, and the record moves noticeably closer to the idea of the classic song. Deadburger describe themselves as "an acoustic-psychedelic orchestra of eight members".

The opening track, "La fisica delle nuvole", is a compelling spoken piece accompanied by violins and horns. Funk rhythms dominate "Bruciando il piccolo padre", which imagines Lenin's mummy defending itself against an attempt to have it cremated. "Il mare è scomparso" depicts a post-apocalyptic poem by Michel Houellebecq sung in an unintelligible way, since men who have regressed into wolf form are no longer able to communicate. The record closes with a tribute to Sun Ra, "Starburger".

La chiamata (2020) marks a further shift, while still remaining within that vast cauldron broadly definable as avant-rock. Alongside the four regular members of the historic line-up, there's an impressive roster of guests: no fewer than eight drummers drawn from among the best on the Italian scene. The album positions itself as the complete alter ego of its predecessor - no longer an ethereal inner journey but a voyage into matter, towards external reality. At the heart of the record is the figure of the shaman seen on the cover, perhaps the only free man in a world of men depicted in modernity's ideal setting - the shopping mall, gathering place for the zombie-men of Romero. Distorted guitars are everywhere, and double drums feature on every track, lending the music a percussive edge bordering on the tribal.

It opens with “Onoda Hiroo”, dedicated to the Japanese lieutenant who survived for a full thirty years in a jungle in the Philippines, unaware that World War II had ended. There's anger here, decidedly greater than in previous works, but as always an anger that is conscious and reasoned. This is evident in “Un incendio visto da lontano”, a jazzy, howled track where Vittorio Nistri's lyrics prompt us to reflect on our passivity towards the suffering of others. The title track is the harshest piece, an invective built from the senseless screams of shopping-mall patrons aimed at the shaman, the only free and authentic man, mocked for his otherness. But the man enslaved by consumerism has nothing left to do but wait for the final wave that will sweep him away forever.

The absolute peak is “Triptych”, a cover of the Max Roach piece from his masterpiece LP and anthem of freedom and anti-racism, “We Insist! – Freedom Now Suite” (1960). Just percussion and voices, the two primal elements of music (here with a few small electronic manipulations), starting slowly with bows screeching on cymbals, then repeated percussion, singing that gradually turns into a chilling scream worthy of the Cromagnon's own deliriums. The central track is probably “Tamburo sei pazzo”, where the shaman plays his drum (the element that sets him apart from the mass of zombie-men, making him a symbol of freedom). Freedom is seen by the unfree as dangerous and insane (remember the film “Easy Rider”?). That doesn't stop the shaman from continuing to play. The Sicilian-dialect words of Alfio Antico kick off a bold, daring and inventive piece. Between guitars, horns and an unchallenged dominance of percussion, this four-part narrative track is one of the most advanced points in Vittorio Nistri's poetics.

“Manifesto cannibale” might bring to mind the cannibal films of 1970s Italian genre cinema. Here, though, there's no need to travel to darkest Africa to meet cannibals. In this avant-rock track, man cannibalizes the world around him every day, making him the cannibal of himself. Prophetic lyrics over distorted guitars make clear just how much modern habits and the ever more pervasive “new” ideas proliferating daily are actually worth (“Deadburger is like your heroes: nothing at all, it's like your hopes, nothing, virtual society, nothing at all, an online protest, nothing, your updates, nothing at all, the strongman in charge, nothing at all”). Closing the record is “Blu quasi trasparente”, a track that vaguely suggests the idea of a ballad, albeit an anomalous one. In the future there will be nothing beyond the shopping mall, the capitalist world will be perfectly realized (“Non c'è un altrove” — “There is no elsewhere”). The final chants, repeated some twenty times, “Happiness Is A Warm Mall”, close out, with pessimism, what could be defined as a manifesto of ideas for this Tuscan band.

In 2022 Vittorio Nistri and Simone Tilli released the first album of a new project, Ossi, born as a side branch of the Deadburger story, almost a spin-off that strays from the main experimental path to move toward a sound that meets psychedelic rock, garage rock, with various collages typically Zappa-esque. The music of the Ossi project — while starting from two now-historicized sonic worlds — is thus fully rooted in today's Italy, a garage-rock-psychedelic-freak sound with ambitions of songwriting, of storytelling, of music that wants, in its own way, to represent its own contemporary moment.

“Ossi” thus takes us into the horrors of today's Italy, into the vulgarity of ever more violent election campaigns or the deranged conspiracy theories that, over the past two years, between aliens and microchips hidden in vaccines, have reached paroxysmal levels. In many ways, the debut of the Ossi project could represent what “La macarena su Roma” by Iosonouncane represented in 2010: a realistic fresco of the worst Italy, an opportunistic, racist and irrational Italy, capable above all of hating and screaming without understanding.

The stripped-down rock of “Ventriloquist Rock” is thus a manifesto of intent that condenses twenty years of Italian politics into just two minutes. The recordings of rallies and TV broadcasts start with the “Basta” screamed at the top of her lungs by Giorgia Meloni, move to Giancarlo Gentilini's zero tolerance, to Grillo's “vaffanculo”, all the way to Sgarbi's usual insults and the inevitable Salvini, in a boorish circus that mirrors a country easily manipulated by whichever pied piper comes along. The big “Vaffanculo” chorus that arrives after about a minute is the inevitable endpoint after such a setup.

Another collage of recordings that perfectly depicts today's Italy, updated to the Covid era, can be found in “Out Demons Out”, an “Italianized” cover of the track by The Edgar Broughton Band. This brilliant and tragicomic psychedelic-blues collage is a journey through delusions about aliens, modified DNA, vaccines that turn people into robots and other absurdities of that sort. Real news events provide the subject matter for tracks like “Toy Boy”, “Miss Tendopoli” and “O' Pisciaturu”, the latter dedicated to the “brilliant” political career of the little-known Domenico Zambetti, with rock music stripped to the bone. Besides the cover of the Monks, “Monk Time” — once again updated to Italian affairs, in this case a parish priest who accused women of being the real culprits behind femicides — one of the most interesting and most electronic tracks is “Naturalmente non possiamo pagarti”, which tackles, in ultra-weird mode, the scourge of unpaid youth labor.

Within this horror, faced constantly with irony, there is only one exception, represented by the grand finale, which seems to offer a glimmer of hope for our country.

“Navarre”, with distorted, almost desert-rock guitars, tells the one positive story: that of a volunteer at an animal shelter who saved the life of a dying wolf.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google