Nichelodeon - The performances of the "cantattore"

La stanza suona ciò che non vedo (2006) is a collection of more conventional songs centred around vocal acrobatics. Still, the progressive flair of "La torre più alta" (another soundtrack) and the 12-minute jazz-rock psychodrama of "Disegnando cattedrali di cellule" stand out.

Milano is thus ready to launch the mutant project NichelOdeon, tested out with the live album Cinemanemico (2008) and then brought to full fruition with the first rock opera Il Gioco del Silenzio (2010). One notable absence in the new outfit: drums. The rhythm is nonetheless magnificently rendered by piano and percussion, though in truth this is a monumental, fragile, unstable stream of vocal-instrumental consciousness, without pause or form. The magical realm of Canterbury is just a stone's throw away.

A mix of grave nursery rhymes and civic ballads, "Fame" and "Il giardino degli altri" are steeped in organic orchestrations of piano, brass and electronics, converging into musical-theatre piano cantatas, perpetually opposed by an inextinguishable chaos: "Fiaba", "Malamore" and "La luna", the Gregorian chants in "Amanti in guerra", the explosive bolero of "Ciò che rimane", and a whole series of recitatives — like "Apnea" — that are nothing short of impossible. The entire structure is held up practically by the musicians' sheer force of imagination alone, each given their own variable space for improvisation and design.

The composer's voice winds supple through the concept, even through stylistic detours ("Claustrofilia", a kind of Bedouin dance), but above all echoing Stratos (in moments of joyful abstract uproar with Area), reaching anarchic sketches disguised as atonal sound sculpture, "Ombre Cinesi", and attaining new heights of harsh, transfigured pandemonium in "Se".

Adython (2012) draws on the poems of Belgian writer Erna "Kasjanoova" Franssens to give rise to two long vocal improvisations. "L'Oracle di Delfi" (15 minutes), with electronics by Attila Faravelli and a quivering soundscape (with occasional dissonant peaks), is a summation of the great pioneers of adventurous singing, from Buckley to Galas and on to Stratos. This approach is deepened by the shapeless, neurasthenic "Adython" (32 minutes), with Stefano Ferrian's sax and Alfonso Santimone's live electronics, which conjure aboriginal harmonics and lysergic reverbs.

NO (2012) is another live album.

Radiata 5tet, a more explicitly jazz-oriented, off-the-cuff project, gives birth to Aurelia Aurita (2012), a spectral, rarefied concert for winds and avant-garde vocalism.

With the two-part Bath Salts (2013), "D'amore e di vuoto" and "Di guerre e rinascite", Milano returns to his NichelOdeon alter ego, launching a period of grandiose multimedia, multidisciplinary operettas. The "Prologo", for electronic harp and bombastic storyteller's tone, is highly revealing of what follows: it's the backbone of the work. It continues with a jungle remix in "Un posto sicuro", and many other streams of consciousness featuring a wealth of advanced chamber-orchestration devices (the exotic, watercolour glissandos of "Surabaya Johnny", the cubist angles of "Johnny dei pirati", "Trittico 50 mg" and the 12 minutes of "L'urlo ritrovato"). In "Ricordo d'infanzia" the dissonant turbulence implodes into a cauldron of voices. There's a clear lowering of tone compared to the labyrinth of Gioco, in favour of an openly poetic mood, entirely centred on vocal performance. The accompaniment is often more traditionally jazz-rock, and goes along for the ride. Milano aims at a refounding of intimist musical theatre that, for now, is somewhat drawn out.

Exceptions — but notable ones — are "Terra", a powerful, dramaturgical reinterpretation of post-rock, the "total" performance of "7 azioni" (a sung-recitative overlaid onto a monologue), another ace up his sleeve, and "Bolle", taut and feverish to the point of dissolving into electronics, with theatrical touches drawn from both Tom Waits and Nick Cave, and avant-garde touches drawn from Pierre Henry's musique concrète. The exception within the exception, however, is a cover: a lengthy reinterpretation of "Looking Glass" by Peter Hammill, a jewel in the crown of his experimental crooning.

For the subsequent L'Enfant Et Le Menure (2013) Milano transforms into InSonar. It's his most operatic creation: titanic lieder like "Thief Of Toys" (with sax and assorted disturbances) and multidimensional arias like "L'inventasogni" (spectral breath-backdrops and a foreground of liquid beats) in the first chapter, "L'Enfant", bear this out. There are reworkings of vocal liturgies in "Simpsons Sing Gounod" that turn into reworkings of musical fairy tales in "L'estasi di Santo Nessuno" (a piece that dismantles itself to let spatial, tense sounds escape), and then "La stanza a sonagli", twenty radiant minutes atop electronically altered vocal laments and a lapping of shoreline. The strongest storytelling number here, though, is "Dieci bambini cacao" (12 minutes), built on the finest melody — one repeated endlessly, as in formulaic poems — and on phase shifts that turn into collective cosmic improvisations.

Milano's vocalisations are more fervent than ever. In "Hamelinvoice", closing the first part, they ring out like crystal glassware. At the start of the second, "Ashima", in "Liberami/Tabernacolo erotico" they turn into sorcery that unleashes a danse macabre for brass and electronics. In "Gallia#2" his mutant technique becomes a cacophonous screech. In "La torre più alta" and "Plaisir D'Amour" multiple calligraphies overlap (voodoo harmonics, flamenco arpeggios, sitar) before launching into a devilish progressive stomp. But two purely instrumental pieces also stand out remarkably: the final vision of "Medina", accompanied by Middle Eastern moods fused into a spatial vertigo, and "Menura Latham", a gestural poem of indefinite counterpoint and multiplied dissonances.

Helping Milano explore his paths are many guests of great personality, but the sorcery of this chapter, superior in commitment and construction to Bath Salts, is spoiled by covers — moreover rather incoherent ones — that diminish, interrupt and even contradict the composer's delirium.

Musica Cruda (2013), released under the NichelOdeon name, and Neve Sporca (2013), released under the InSonar name, collect live versions and alternate studio takes.

These two artistic personas, NichelOdeon and InSonar, merge and join forces for the latest Ukiyoe (2014), which moreover sacrifices some of the music in favour of the accompanying 25-minute video-art medium-length film "Quickworks & Deadworks", curated by Francesco Paolo Paladino, as well as a series of paintings made for the occasion. It's an elegiac concept album inspired by (and dedicated to) the sea, one of whose nerve centres lies in the 9 minutes of "Marinaio", a Mediterranean pulse lost amid the "choral" dissonances of the instruments, followed by a shapeless recitative in which Milano gives full rein to his eclecticism (even touching on castrato alto registers), ending with underwater suspensions, marine hallucinations and shrieking siren laments that screech and screech, embodied in a high-pitched violin solo. "MA(r)LE", 19 minutes in three parts, sums up and expands on these intuitions. The first part opens with mad trilling over a jungle beat and a wailing free-jazz sax. The second is an accordion toccata, somewhat Parisian, somewhat Nino Rota, somewhat Bach-like organ, gradually pierced by the singer, moving from a strangled high-pitched scream to a grave, guru-like tremor to an avant-garde muezzin, sharpening the saraband and making it darker, more sentimental and then gothically spectral. The third plunges into an electronic abyss of heavily discordant musical signs, finally uncovering the last revelation, the last diaphanous call of the sirens.

Even the lesser, surrounding tracks make themselves felt. "I pesci dei tuoi fiumi" is another avant-garde recitative, packed with classy touches tending towards serial soundpainting, and the prelude "Veleno" is an operatic duet wrapped in languid chamber timbres. In any case, it is Milano's freest and most difficult creation, only vaguely interested in narrative and musical theatre and much more inclined towards pictorial abstraction, or rather towards radical lyricism: it's the work Peter Hammill never remotely conceived, and the artist's definitive testament (singer, performer, actor, painter, etc.)

"Tutti i liquidi di Davide" (2014) is a 7-minute single conceived as a teaser for Ukiyoe, though it has little to do with that album's more fairy-tale-like, fundamentally melodic progressive folk. It's actually more revealing of Milano's parallel activity reinterpreting Friulian folk songs.

"Vergini e serpenti" (2015) is a remake that serves as a tribute to Ivan Cattaneo, made in collaboration with Fabrizio Palumbo and Erica Scherl.

Milano contributes to the anthology Out Of Standard Italy 4 (2016) with the lengthy performance of "Blue Jarman" (20 minutes), a collaboration with Piero Chianura, and appears as a backing vocalist on Paul Roland's White Zombie (2017).

Even better is his contribution to the long-awaited Maledette Rockstar (2018) by Maisie. His are the most powerfully tragicomic moments: he steps in on the brief, brutal zeuhl of "Un programma politico sintetico", the introduction to the album's dazzling centerpiece "Ruderi e macerie #3", seven minutes of free-jazz psychodrama, and crowns the Meat Loaf-esque post-Sanremo apocalyptic ceremony "Wilma e il diavolo" with a little gem of a castrato-like high note amid formless chaos.

This is followed by his participation in Giovanni Floreani and other veterans' Strepitz Open Project, for the double debut live album Punto d'Incontro (2018). More substantial is his involvement in Salvo Lazzara's Appunti per una Teoria delle Maree (2018), alongside Luca Pietropaoli and Davide Guidoni. Milano also takes part in the debut of Morreale, Appunti di viaggio (2020).

Finally Milano returns to original creation with a new monolith, Incidenti-Lo Schianto (2021), delivering everything one has come to expect from this metaphysical jester of avant-pop song: harmonically slack pieces, as unformed in the tonalism of Monteverdi's "Poppea" as in the atonalism of Schönberg's "Pierrot Lunaire", melodically dissolved between folk and absolute music, and almost entirely arrhythmic. A "stylistic" expressionism: the author appropriates as many idioms as possible to voice his own anguish on multiple levels. Although it revives what has so far perhaps been his most successful formula, NichelOdeon/InSonar, and although it imports the concept of the cycle (in the literary sense, it's a long series of tracks subtitled "Senza valore"), the record is in substance disjointed and diffuse, shaped above all by his most recent collaborative experiences — an album of notes from various lineups tried out over these years, as well as pieces that had already appeared elsewhere. Not Me is one of the most open conceptions; from it come the gothic opening with an atonal cabaletta over lugubrious, dissonant sonic undertows ("Non esistono"), a virtuosic a cappella free-form piece that fades into rarefied quilts of symphonic keyboards ("Con dedica"), a hybrid of anti-musical and cathedral lied for organ unisons within a highly disjointed stereophonic polyphony ("Senza ritorno"), a cubist fantasia ("Out Let"), and especially the electronic motet for sustained vowels ("Sabbia scura", one of the peaks of this whole cyclopean collection). Under the name This Order, Milano's particularly acrobatic vocal work ventures into a fusion of death-metal, free-jazz and electronic poem on "Variations On The Jargon King" (with lyrics by Peter Hammill and a virtual guitar solo by Paolo Tofani). "Ho gettato mio figlio da una rupe perché non somigliava a Fabrizio Corona" is instead credited to This Order together with the kindred Coucou Sélavy, a twelve-minute suite (more Zappa-esque than progressive) built on hard-folk and black-metal, seasoned above all with a Dadaist spirit that gives rise to a masterpiece interlude, a whirlpool of absurdist recitation, gestural and electroacoustic music. InSonar instead conceives "Nyama-Gettarsi oltre", a ten-minute operatic folk "canzona" sliced up in several ways, not entirely successful. NichelOdeon remains confirmed as his closest configuration to a storyteller who is at once mournful, verbose and cerebral. "Il barbiere degli occhi" is a sonata for violin, piano and lashing percussion that ranges from classicism to circus-like accompaniment, while Milano the showman reaches almost grand-guignol outcomes, both the crowning achievement and the limit of his torrential outpouring of words and idioms, often too caught up in its own history. "La scatola" is nonetheless a deconstruction — indeed a demolition — of a little waltz that culminates in an ecstatic chorale (and "L'ultima sigaretta" is another parody of an almost baroque chorale). Undeniable, throughout this endless series of "Senza valore" variations, is the connective tissue provided by extreme attention to detail. Of it all, the work under the name Not Me stands out without question.

The single "Ho gettato mio figlio da una rupe" (2021) has as its B-side "Ho gettato Fabrizio Corona da una rupe", thirteen minutes long, another sprawling narrative-dramaturgical, tonal-atonal, chamber-electronic epic, derived from his scoring of the silent-film classic "Inferno".

The double album ManifestAzioni (2023), credited to Claudio Milano's End Friends (the Tesla coil), anthologizes more than a decade of live performances across all his configurations (Strepitz, Not Me, NichelOdeon, InSonar), as well as his numerous collaborations (I Sincopatici, Area Open Project, Arrington De Dionyso) and guest appearances (Eugenioprimo Saragoni, Giulia Zaniboni, Paolo Carelli, Vincenzo Zitello).

Once the cauldron of Incidenti had been emptied, Milano turns to more focused vocal-chamber collaborative recitals, recorded live primarily to keep his improvisational verve intact.

The scoring of the one-act piece "Inferno 1911" (2023), later recorded on Decimo Cerchio (2024) with I Sincopatici, is in every respect a vocal-theatrical tour de force: from the plaintive aria with electric piano of "Ed ecco verso noi venir per nave", to the demonic electronic set-pieces of "Per me si va nella città dolente" and "Il conte Ugolino", to the breathless recitar cantando of "Pier Della Vigna", all the way to the recital-within-a-recital of "Il cammino sotterraneo". The crossover between grotesque monologuing declamation and Byzantine/Indian-style accompanying song in "L'angoscia delle genti" makes him sound like a Tim Buckley fronting the Third Ear Band, but his is also an art of balancing acts between parts, of stylistic chiaroscuro and shifting registers, starting with pieces like "Stige", an almost entirely instrumental trifle, and the fragment "I dilapidatori", a dissonant collective improvisation. Aboriginal trance states can thus be subjected to jolts of effects and fade-outs ("Amor che a nullo amato"), electro-Gregorian vocal drones are accompanied by macabre glockenspiel ("I traditori"), and avant-garde numbers rise to become the centre of gravity of the whole work ("Qui sono gli eresiarchi"). When the sarabande gains drums, the only concessions to a more conventional gothic rock emerge ("Lucifero", "La terza Bolgia", "I barattieri"). Singer and companions do a distinct job of pulling together a work that is, by definition, wildly varied.

For Quigyat (2024), a collaboration with Teo Ravelli's electronics (borda) and a concept centred on war, he revives the NichelOdeon moniker. The title track (9 minutes), moving from a helicopter-like cosmic-music opening, through a Schoenbergian piano sonata, declamatory tones and lashes of electronics, builds up a gothic tension that erupts in a final solo of Aboriginal diplophonic vocalizations. The rest consists mainly of his older pieces performed live and then reprocessed in the studio. The reissue of "Alla statua dei martiri di Gorla" splits between a pathos-laden Vangelis-like ambient-jazz fantasia and a freeform lied-nursery-rhyme (with a high-note peak that crumbles into the void). The 9-minute version of "Ciò che rimane" continues the work's suspended, piano-and-electronics-driven nature, but adds the touch of a rhythm section drawn ever closer to chaos.

The partnership with Ravelli is renewed for Fracture/Appearance/Fade (2024), a musical-theatrical piece based on a text by Niccolò Clemente featuring Alberto Nemo, yielding the lament poised between operatic style and cantillation in "Frattura iniziale" and the disjointed aria over a decadent cavatina (and the "dissociative" role of the song's pronounced reverb) in "Comparsa", while the shorter electronic nightmare storytelling of "Dissolvenza" sounds more personal still.

Milano becomes NichelOdeon once again, while still carrying forward his collaboration with Ravelli, for Flipper (2025), a sprawling cornucopia of covers, reinterpretations and reworkings gathered from even before his debut, made with a cornucopia of guests.

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