Psycho Kinder - Alive and invisible

Psycho Kinder is a one man band from the Marche region, born in 2009 from the creative mind of lyricist Alessandro Camilletti, initially assisted by musician Giorgio Mozzicafreddo, by composer Michele Caserta (leader of Drama Emperor, responsible for arrangements and mixing) and by Marco "El Topo" Luchetti for the artwork. Since his 2011 debut, the project has drawn attention for an existentialist, disillusioned approach to life, born of a discomfort and a sense of inadequacy typical of the new generations. In particular, Camilletti's lyrics, rich in poetic and philosophical references, seem to give voice to an awareness of the various cages that enclose everyday life, those rigid conventions that grip everyone's existence – especially that of younger generations, who would have every right to aspire to an "other" life – but who find themselves, willingly or not, following paths already laid out by others. Children of a hollowed-out democracy, lacking the words to build great ideals and great visions, where only crime reporting seems to dictate the slow pace of the days. But Camilletti's outlook is not hopeless, as it might seem at first glance; his is an active nihilism that wants to shake clouded consciences, one that finds in the hatred of conformity and the pride of one's own otherness the path toward an authentic awareness of reality.

Camilletti's path seems directed toward nothingness, or at least toward not believing in anything that could be redemptive. His is, broadly speaking, a negative philosophy that turns the Socratic "I know that I know nothing" into "I know that what you're all telling me is false." A bleak vision of an unheeded prophet, steeped in proud disenchantment. The music is (at least in the early days) instead rooted in the post-punk tradition (solid bass and guitar lines with more freedom to roam), with references to Joy Division, Bauhaus, Death In June, but with starker, more minimal atmospheres, while if we look for Italian touchstones, these are certainly the declamatory style of Massimo Volume or Offlaga Disco Pax (minus the former's narrative element and the latter's irony) and the punk screams of CCCP.

The debut comes with a small self-produced CD, Psycho Kinder (2011), with just two highly representative tracks. "2009," dedicated to the centenary of the birth of Marinetti's Futurist movement, combines frenetic electronic and new-wave rhythms, but it's nihilism that leaves its mark. The young Camilletti's vision focuses on the grim reality of "dying cities," made of violence and loneliness. The track can only end with the anguished, repeated words "loneliness and darkness," about as far as you can get from Marinetti's vision of infinite progress bringing happiness and well-being. A dark-wave bass line kicks off "Un Uomo," a journey into the sense of inadequacy that suffocates Camilletti's generation and condemns diversity to the status of a manufacturing defect – the factory in question being the one that produces men all alike, all perfectly fitted in ("I'm a door that won't close, a mismatched joint"). Here too, the Psycho Kinder man is the opposite of the Nietzschean superman: he's like "an eagle with tar wings forced to eat with the hens," a man forced to live inside a society-as-cage where there are no merits or differences, only mediocrity and flattening – no soaring flights, just an endless descent downward. To survive, the different one has two options: the simplest is to adapt, not to rise but to regress to a lower state (from eagle to hen) in order not to be crushed, on pain of marginalization ("I'm an unwelcome guest, I'm a sick man's blanket"). The second, more courageous option is to become invisible to the masses (a concept that will become clearer in "Alive and invisible" in 2015) and to firmly hold on to one's own identity. Caught in this dichotomy between what one believes oneself to be ("I'm dynamite") and what one is forced to be, it's hard to say whether one has ever truly been a man at all.

These two short tracks reappear on Psycho Kinder's first EP, Democratiche ipocrisie (2012), which showcases the band's gift for declamation. Camilletti's man is still a victim: in "Per non impazzire" he's a "drugged beast in a gilded cage," once again conveying that sense of oppression consumer society inflicts on modern man. The mood grows increasingly Joy Division-like, and modernity is still seen as an oppressive burden on human life ("Progress runs and runs, crashing down on our ideals, emptying them out"). The words that might save us (the search for "true" words as opposed to the thousands of fallacious opinions) are absent from modern society, replaced by useless chatter from political talk shows ("Words give way to democratic hypocrisies"). The EP closes with "Spelonche," built on a raw, minimal guitar sound.

Incommunicability and loneliness, the inescapable offspring of our times, remain at the heart of Camilletti's dialogues on the following CD, L'Incomunicabile/L'Estasi (2013), again just two short tracks that would later appear on the band's actual debut LP, Il tramonto dell'evidente (2014). It's as if Camilletti decided to pick up exactly where the previous EP left off, from its most stripped-down track, "Spelonche." Il tramonto dell'evidente sounds leaner and sparer still ("L'incomunicabile"), scaling back the dark-wave influences to make room for more personal readings, with brief nods to the most minimal post-rock of Labradford ("Segrete edificazioni"). The voice alternates between declamation and whisper, aware that in modern society there will be no ears to hear either one. Everyday reality seems to vanish into nothing ("Panico"), lost in the magma of a virtual reality that grants us a false freedom ("Il tramonto dell'evidente"). The electronics intensify in step with an overarching pessimism that places no trust in any of society's organized structures, where one finds oneself lost in "a life with no direction" ("Un vuoto insostenibile"). "L'estasi" returns to decidedly post-punk territory, with a repetitive bass line underpinning the guitar. The sound is pared right down to the bone, the lyrics hermetic, and the ecstasy of the title is more dreamlike than real. "La coerenza della follia" is a simple texture over which a monologue by the great philosopher Emanuele Severino is laid.

The collaboration between Camilletti and Ali Salvioni gives rise to a new two-track EP, this time not featured on any LP, Alive and invisible/Nel caos dell'Ecumene (2015). The distance between the duo and the surrounding society grows ever wider, as in a philosophical isolation in which one remains "alive" but "invisible" in order to survive, so different from "the others" that one must flee in order to become transparent. Fashion and conformism are held up as examples to show one's own otherness against an immense mass of "identical" people. The lyrics reach new heights, deepening and clarifying concepts already present in earlier work. This short EP can be seen as a turning point that splits the band's discography in two, marking a passage toward new maturity in the lyrics and the beginning of a rigorous process of subtraction in the music.

This conscious pursuit of marginality, which is essentially a total apostasy from consumerist capitalist society, gains a sharper capacity for social reading with a revolutionary spirit on The Psycho Kinder Tapes (2016). It opens straight away with the cutting spoken-word of "Stato di violenza," which calls out both the powerful manipulators and the spineless who let themselves be manipulated (“Vorrei violare questo stato di violenza permanente/ che chiamano pace/ vorrei decapitare chi detiene il potere/ e la servitù incapace”). The bass tends to disappear, as does the dark component, making room for synths and electronic rhythms. But the duality between near-dance rhythms paired with claustrophobic lyrics and recordings of the voice of the father of existentialism, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, lends the record an air that's anything but inviting. The mass of dwarfs who "tyrannize the truth," who philosophically live in opinion or in "myth," indifferent to the pursuit of truth, are the protagonists of "Oltre Il Tempo," architects and chief culprits of a "hypertrophic collective ego" that has transformed the world, bringing it to collapse. Philosophy is still the answer, here identified with nature, which "preserves our ancestors" and will bring back home (that is, away from myth and closer to truth) anyone who, like Camilletti, "fights wars invisible to most." The three instrumental minutes of "Psycho Kinder" – written by Giorgio Mozzicafreddo and Michele Caserta – have something of the Residents' weirdness about them and serve as a prelude to the remix of "Alive and invisible (Miro Snejdr Remix)." The rhythms slow down, edging close to spoken word with a post-rock backdrop on "Inviolabili e sacri," which denounces the incommunicability and alienation of the present day ("we speak without communicating / like automatons in a technological circus"). Philosophy remains the chief axis around which Camilletti's ideas take shape, this time with the words of Ezra Pound in "With Usura," built on a minimal rhythmic structure. There's no hope for society in the world of Psycho Kinder; perhaps only some hypothetical "Viaggio allucinato" could bring down the "walls of this civilization." The guitar grows more distorted than anywhere else in their discography so far, but the journey is surely doomed to fail, so strong is the nihilistic inertia weighing down on the unaligned. After another remix that gives new life to "Il tramonto dell'evidente (Carnera Remix)," we arrive at "Essere," philosophy's eternal subject since antiquity. The music of Ludovico Padovan of Wanda Wulz is a long, distorted electro-acoustic sonic carpet over which philosophical monologues on the eternal concepts of the One, Being and Non-Being overlap.

Psycho Kinder's music has become something of a cult object, so much so that, after a collaboration with Milanese musician Fabrizio Testa ("Free Camilletti!" in 2016), 2018 saw the release of ExTension, a reworking of ten tracks from the previous LPs and EPs, remixed and often completely overhauled by various musicians who, over the years, had come to appreciate Camilletti's electronic dark-wave and his warnings of apocalypse, both real and moral. The tracks are stripped down to their bare essence, as in the collaborations with Post Contemporary Corporation frontman Valerio Zecchini ("Nel caos dell'ecumene"), Andrea Chimenti ("Essere"), pianist Deca in a minimal version of "Oltre il tempo," Carnera ("Il tramonto dell'evidente"), or else saturated with energy, as in the ever-present Michele Caserta's tension-filled remix of "Un uomo," Celery Price's "2009," or the industrial-leaning "L'incomunicabile (Kill Your Boyfriend Remix)."

This recognition from the Italian underground galvanizes Camilletti, who in 2018 changes course completely and finds, with Diario ermetico, what is probably his most effective means of communication yet. Everything is reduced even further to its essentials, from the music to the lyrics, purged of every superfluous element, to the length of the tracks, which never exceeds two minutes – except in one case out of eleven – down to the titles, which disappear altogether, replaced simply by numbers. Camilletti dons the robes of the hermetic philosopher/narrator/poet and abandons entirely any tie to the dark-wave-industrial sounds of his beginnings. With the collaboration of the great pianist Deca, who here handles the music and mixing, new sonic scenarios open up, tied to modern classical and ambient music, which become the substrate for a poetics in a style reminiscent of the poet Ungaretti. On the second track, over a moving piano part by Deca, one grasps just how raw and pessimistic this philosophical path is ("We proceed recklessly toward the fulfillment of nothingness"), devoid of any hope of life in the present ("There is no epic, no blood, no ardor, only a slow withering"). Brushing up against dark-ambient territory, the record moves closer to a mature denunciation of a modernity born of thousands of senseless opinions that distract from the pursuit of truth, making clear how contemporary civilization stands practically opposed to the one envisioned by the philosophers of antiquity, who aspired to truth even while aware they could never attain it (third track). On the fifth track, set to a military-march rhythm, Camilletti places himself at the head of a thought with no army, summoning the will to redraw the "borders of dreams." Words "leave the eyes and migrate, alive, in search of life," as if they possessed a life of their own independent of their creator, finding new life in the mind of whoever listens to them. A hope doomed to fail ("I would wish not to exist except in the memories that have hosted me") if not in memories – immaterial places, and precisely for that reason, infinite. On the only long track ("Track 11"), fragments of films by Bergman and Tarkovsky, readings by Pasolini from Ezra Pound's "Pisan Cantos," round out a picture rich in references that marks a point of no return for the Marche-born lyricist's new poetics.

In 2019 this ongoing process of subtraction reaches a fork in the road: change, while at the same time staying true to a path consistent with the band's own discography. The brilliant idea is that the guru of Italian minimalism, Lino Capra Vaccina, could be the perfect meeting point between the ongoing path of subtraction and the need for evolution. The collaboration with the author of "Antico Adagio" thus becomes the solution to this difficult crossroads, the starting point of a small experiment consisting of just two singles that could pave the way for a new path with interesting developments in the years to come. Just two tracks, five minutes each (Un Disegno Infantile/All'Ombra Di Metafore), where vibraphone and piano set the pace and where Camilletti's words fit in naturally, themselves as minimal as Lino Vaccina's notes (who also handled the mixing). The lyrics shed much of the previous angry pessimism in favor of a more reflective quality. No longer the man set against an unacceptable society, whose only defense is voluntary marginality. This time, man stands before nature itself, aware that his salvation is only possible through total surrender – the exact opposite of struggle and resistance. If Camilletti had once been the champion of a proud difference from the masses, of the search for a strong identity, now instead is the moment to surrender completely. A surrender into mother nature that is liberating, and the only philosophically possible hope of salvation.

"Un disegno infantile" reflects precisely on how the sight of a wood can give inner peace. Despite its apparent "disorder" – which sets it apart from a luxurious garden obsessively manicured down to every detail – the vision of trees creates inner peace precisely because it's far removed from the obsessive mental rigidity we're subjected to every day. Disorder is therefore also, and above all, freedom: an absence of rules and mental patterns imposed by the false consumerist needs (billionaires' villas with gardens), it is "nature's grace", in which to lose oneself without reservation, like a return to an older, more authentic self.

"All'ombra di metafore" is linked to the ancient Indian philosophy of the Vedas. It too is connected to a kind of surrender, but the vision here is even broader. Man is no longer set against other men, is no longer a lone individual pitted against unyielding models of society, but is indivisibly bound in his personal essence to a universal one, man and nature united yet only temporarily separated in the fleeting span of life, before finding each other again soon after ("siamo uno noi due in esilio dal tempo"). So all human experiences (whether those of a single individual or those of a complex society) don't really exist, but are like images flowing past ("scorrono le immagini"), like metaphors endlessly repeating themselves ("all'ombra di metafore") that render superfluous the human categories into which we file every phenomenon or event ("e saltano le categorie"). Everything we believe to be real, all the superstructures we imagine as real and that totally shape our lives, in fact don't exist ("la storia non esiste") unless framed within a much broader context.

Continuing along his hermetic path, in 2020 Camilletti arrives at Epigraph, post-industrial recordings (as the subtitle states) as synthetic and immediate as an epigraph should indeed be. From a man screaming his own state of otherness and isolation, to a hermetic whisper that certainly goes unheard, we arrive at the involution of the Residents-esque robotic man, now reduced to a brain-dead marionette whose presence can only be detected "by a tag" and whose life can be Kafkianly planned out in a "protocol". Alessandro Camilletti's voice consequently becomes inhuman, metallic, indeed robotic, like an alternate version of the Residents' project, of the song that symbolizes human involution, "Six Things To A Cycle". The first three tracks ("Tape 1", "Tape 2", "Tape 3") can be understood each as a continuation of the other, since they reiterate the same ideas. On "Tape 1", with the collaboration of Moreno Padoan, the voice becomes imperceptible, crushed by industrial electronic chaos. The words get lost in the chaos but retain a deep meaning. On "Tape 2", with regular collaborator Michele Caserta, the voice turns into the verses of a bureaucrat robot, "Non più fine, l'uomo finisce in protocolli", repeated continuously, only to be replaced minute after minute by totally dehumanized electronic voices. A life without purpose that turns us into robotic puppets emerges even more explicitly on "Tape 3", a new hermetic poem set against an electronic backdrop that describes Kafkian man, lost in an oppressive bureaucracy that has emptied him of all personality, giving him in exchange a role and a tag. The inevitable process of reduction could only lead to the disappearance of Camilletti's voice, which fades almost entirely away in the last two tracks, among which "Tape 8" stands out.

Of an unusual length for the Psycho Kinder discography (12 minutes), the closing track of "Epigraph" is a long experimental electronic journey in which the synths seem to recall subhuman, now unrecognizable voices emerging from nowhere, unable to communicate anything at all. At the end of so much incomprehensible delirium, the iconic words of Italian philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter emerge: "I have never known the absolute, but I know it the way an insomniac knows sleep, the way one who stares into darkness knows light". As if to say that there is something beyond our roles and our protocols, but it is invisible to our eyes.

A few months later, in February 2021, Camilletti found sudden inspiration to produce, almost in one go, one of his most overtly philosophical works, Perì Phýseos, drawing on Presocratic philosophy and, within that group, in particular on its most obscure and poetic philosopher, Heraclitus. Camilletti takes fragments from the only available Heraclitean work, "On Nature", reconciling them with the industrial music of Maurizio Bianchi, author of a discography as boundless as it is clandestine. Heraclitus is the obscure, oracular philosopher of the opposition between opposites that sustain one another, and which exist precisely because they are opposed (day-night, hunger-satiety), engaged in an eternal contest (night being born makes day disappear, and vice versa) that is the foundation of all existence. Hence the idea of life as polemos, an eternal war of conflicting opposites, a reality invisible to the eyes of those who remain slaves to myth and falsehood. The nine tracks (once again untitled) feature a dark-ambient-industrial backdrop underpinning Camilletti's readings.

One fully grasps the greatness of Heraclitus's fragments, his extraordinary ability to perceive reality, intuiting thoughts centuries before the word "science" had any common meaning. In the second track, electronic winds form the backdrop to the fragment of Heraclitus that removes the gods from the creation of the world, envisioning a cosmos that always existed, never created by any god, and that will always exist ("questo cosmo non lo fece nessuno degli dei né degli uomini, ma sempre era ed è e sarà fuoco sempre vivente"), reaching conclusions still considered heretical today, twenty-five hundred years after they were first prophesied.

The harmony born of discord (track 3) is recreated across eleven minutes of utterly dissonant electronic distortions. The most successful track is probably the fourth, with hypnotic vocal overlaps in which opposites (in true Heraclitean fashion) coexist. A sonic magma pervades the fifth track, a primordial chaos underscoring perpetual change ("il sole è nuovo ogni giorno, nello stesso fiume non è possibile entrare due volte"), Heraclitus's idea of eternal becoming, likewise capable of grasping intuitions that science would only manage to prove millennia later.

What's interesting here is the idea of shedding new light on the ideas of the earliest thinkers, Presocratics no less, pairing them with experimental electronics. An album to be read and listened to, to rediscover ideas that are the true foundation (perhaps even more so than Catholic thought) of Western philosophy.

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