Fabrizio Tavernelli - The Provincial Shaman

According to the Treccani website, the term “shaman” derives from the language of a Siberian people, the Tungus, and refers to “a man capable of acting as a mediator between the human world and the supernatural world of spirits, the dead and deities”. And since Correggio already has its rocker, and contesting him for the role would be a pointless exercise (at least in terms of sales and success), his fellow townsman Fabrizio Tavernelli could well claim the title of shaman. The image of a go-between with spirits and other worlds suits “Taver” well, a musician, songwriter, singer, writer and popularizer who, through his many activities, tells stories, proposes ideas, and surprises. More than with the departed, though, the shaman of Correggio seems to have a direct line to other kinds of spirits: those of eras and geographies, those of the Italian provinces between the 80s and 90s, and of all those who back then were kids or young people avidly devouring whatever culture had to offer, whether popular, highbrow or underground, in the ways that era allowed. Films that arrived on video cassettes with deteriorated images and terrible quality, records, books and comics, sometimes fragments of something bigger that couldn't be explored right away by asking Google or ChatGPT. Things took time and had an aura of mystery: without being nostalgic, that way of consuming culture was an integral part of a way of nourishing one's brain and letting ideas germinate, not better or worse but certainly different from today's. But even now, for those who are culturally hungry and omnivorous, forms of exchange exist, including crowdfunding, and our shaman is always on top of things, having used this form of financing and participation multiple times to realize his projects. All of this is present in Taver's artistic universe: first with En Manque d'Autre and A.F.A., an acronym for Acid Folk Alleanza, then in his solo career and in his various projects and collaborations, years of listening, interests, readings, visions and experiences seep from his music. A refined lyricist, one of the few capable of daring wordplay with the Italian language and of confidently using a register that, musically too, ranges from the serious to the ironic. Fresh off the release of the solo album “Resa incondizionata” and, shortly after, of the album by the duo Energumeni, together with Manitù Rossi of Le forbici di Manitù, Tavernelli is among the people most qualified to reflect on what rock in Italy is today, on what it means to make independent music, and on what that unusual season was that in the 2000s allowed even aliens like him to tour Italy far and wide with an unusual and original musical proposal. But, above all, he is the right person to tell his own story and that of his music.

Your latest album declares an “unconditional surrender,” yet your career seems to be exactly the opposite: since the late 80s you've kept making music outside traditional circuits with determination and, no small feat, with a certain regularity both in terms of releases and live activity. In what sense would you say you've surrendered?

The album's title is also a manifesto, a statement of my existential condition, a conscious surrender to the social, political and anthropological manifestations of our times. I, like others—be they artists, utopians, human beings—have lost, I admit defeat, I understand that victory lies elsewhere, in other sentimental latitudes, that it manifests itself in forms and ways in which I cannot find myself, see myself reflected, recognize myself. From the earliest times when I began to think, to look beyond and elsewhere, from when I began writing songs, I learned to distort reality, to modify it, I sought other planes of the real, altered and parallel visions; this perception, this distorting filter, was already active back when I was a child living in the countryside, in the deep Emilian provinces. Today, this transfiguration is practically daily, pervasive; I no longer even need to make creative efforts, every minute, every fragment of experience, every life, including my own, is immersed in continuous stimulation, in a flow of data and information that my ever more cramped and exhausted human brain can no longer store. Hence the need for external hard drives, for clouds that resemble storm-bearing clouds, hence the proliferation of algorithms and artificial intelligences that work and imagine in our place. In this scenario I seek an artistic and, at the same time, human survival, I seek fallibility, the possibility of error, elements that still set apart a residual humanity. Continuing to elaborate, to feed a line of thought and of course to produce sonic, literary, conceptual, multiform materials, is still a reaction, a sort of cultural resistance, a mission—whether impossible or not doesn't matter. The goal, however irrational, is to keep following a path, for myself and for whoever wants to follow me, accompany me, share other roads, other visions, even contradictions and hallucinations.

In this journey, are self-production and crowdfunding choices or necessities?

After experiences with more prestigious productions, major labels, independents, mainstream or alternative, in a record-and-publishing landscape that has definitively changed (digital platforms, talent shows, formats becoming obsolete, the production/slaughter/butchery of young talents sacrificed to fleeting successes), over the years crowdfunding has allowed me to be totally free and independent. I no longer feel like chasing after, begging for a phone call with the artistic director of a handful of record labels; realistically I'm not of interest to structures devoted to immediate profit, I have no more time to waste and I don't believe in the record or the project of a lifetime, in the epoch-making turning point. I do my own thing, it's an urgency, something that makes me feel good, it's my dialogue with the world and with those who have followed me since the days of En Manque D'Autre or AFA. It's partly a choice, partly a necessity, I'm aware of that, just as my Resa Incondizionata is a mimetic practice, of feigned death, of constant action in spite of everything.

Nowadays anyone can release their own music online, but perhaps it's harder to turn it into a source of income. At the same time, digital technology allows for remote collaborations between musicians who don't need to meet physically to play together. For a musician and listener like you, do the tools available today help or harm music?

Of course, even though I have a dystopian outlook on the world, I'm not a Luddite, or rather a techno-Luddite, and as with any means technology makes available to us, what matters is always the use, the development, the way and the context in which such tools are employed. What's certain is that artificial intelligences open up unthinkable, unpredictable scenarios of omnipotence; artistic creativity itself is increasingly challenged by programs that, at a dizzying pace, are proving capable of shaping reality without the need for a human hand. There are more and more record labels specializing in music rigorously made by AI, literary, figurative and film languages that are by now indistinguishable from artificiality or from the hand and mind of man. With the 1996 AFA album “Nomade psichico” (and later with the albums “Manipolazioni” and “Armonico”) I began reasoning about these shifts and, in a way, describing the impact of technology on our everyday lives, something that recurs in my latest solo records (“Homo Distopiens”, “Algoritmi” and “Resa incondizionata”). On one hand there's fear, on the other fascination, and truly, we're living through a leap, an epoch-making turning point. The internet, the infosphere, digital platforms could be a democratic, horizontal opportunity, but this often remains merely hypothetical, and we've found ourselves facing the disappearance of the future—the future is no longer what we had imagined or idealized. On one hand, the Net has connected artists and situations, it has encouraged and facilitated remote collaborations, it allows for speed and responsiveness in working, in creating networks; I myself make use of it, and having lived through other decades when producing material was undoubtedly more laborious, today I find using technology easy and nimble. On the other hand, the Net has turned into a densely populated jungle in which it's hard to be heard, an ocean in which it's hard to surface; what's needed is more a mastery of social media marketing strategies than real artistic quality or originality.

Irony plays an important role in your music. With A.F.A. it was perhaps a more evident aspect, but it has always remained. In “La notte dei partigiani viventi” you had the courage to tackle historical revisionism and the political return of the right, turning the protagonists of the Resistance into heroes of a sort of horror B-movie. How important is this aspect in your lyrics and, more generally, in your music? Do you think there's a risk of being misunderstood?

I used a more ironic register with En Manque D'Autre and in the early AFA, there has always been a risk of misunderstanding, and I was aware of it. For instance, I don't consider my work from that period to fall into the “demenziale” (comic/nonsense) genre. Sometimes, due to oversimplifications or improper categorizations, someone lumped us into that cauldron, but the register I used was something different. The languages I used were borrowed from the 20th-century avant-gardes: surrealism, Dadaism, Situationism. I've always been drawn to atmospheres and stories that mix the tragic and the ironic, the osmosis between contrasting states of mind, the bitter smile, the mad laugh at everything and everyone, iconoclasm, the absurd, the grotesque, the acid sneer, the lysergic trip. In the same way, my intent is reflected in the manipulation of words and languages, in mixing tones and styles: I've always been fascinated by verbal games, by puns, by automatic writing as a stream of consciousness, by Burroughsian cut-ups, by the contamination between foreign languages, Italian and dialect slang, pidgin, creolizations, onomatopoeia, literary inventions.

You mentioned the “early AFA.” After two albums in which the name was an acronym for Acid Folk Alleanza, in 1996 you came back with “Nomade psichico”, which marks a turning point: the name no longer has periods between the letters, you're now simply “AFA”, and the atmosphere is completely different both sonically and lyrically. There's continuity, even an evident one, in the themes and cultural references, but also a strong change. Trip-hop sounds replace the folk ones, yet it can't be described as a simple embrace of the sounds of the moment—there's more to it: what AFA proposed was the Bristol sound arriving in the Italian provinces, chewed over and digested here until it generated the humus from which your new music was born. The provinces become “exotica,” to quote the track that perhaps more than any other marks the continuity between the band's two eras, and there remains a strong urge to take risks (just think of the mondine's choir over an electronic backing track). Can you tell us about this evolution? How and why did the lyrics and music change?

Your analysis is correct. “Nomade psichico” was a remarkable turning point and is still one of my favorite titles, both in terms of the studio process (it was a sonic adventure), and in terms of lyrics and concept, as well as in terms of the reactions it got. Certainly in the Nineties the new electronic sounds, the beats, the sampling, the art of the remix became a source of inspiration, as did frequenting and collaborating with Maffia, the club that sprang up in Reggio Emilia through which the most important DJs and producers passed. Breakbeat, dub, drum'n'bass, abstract hip-hop, electro, 2step, ninja tune, Warp, Mo' Wax and of course the Bristol scene, Massive Attack (whom we opened for at the Metarock festival in Pisa, earning compliments from Del Naja), Tricky, Portishead. Add to that Howie B's participation on the album “Armonico”, brought into the studio by our friends from Maffia while we were recording. Truth be told, there was already a common thread with the sounds and electronics I had listened to previously: the records and treatments of Brian Eno, Bowie's Berlin trilogy, the electronics used in post-punk, synth-punk, minimalism and contemporary/musique concrète, the electronics used in psychedelia, the cosmic couriers and kraut, industrial music. “Nomade psichico” was included among Italian trip-hop albums, and we benefited from that, but in truth I consider it a deeply psychedelic record that, while using the techniques of the time (sampling, loops, filters, sound manipulation), sits within a context in which the song becomes a grid for experimentation, both musically and lyrically. Experimentation, Fripp, Eno again, post-punk and literature. In those tracks there's a literary vision, from the inner science fiction (or “Fantacoscienza”, as one of my solo works would put it much later) of Philip K. Dick and Ballard, there are dystopian novels, there's the Beat Generation, there are the hallucinations and the cut-up of Burroughs, there's cyberpunk, mutations and modifications of the body, there's nomadism, Hakim Bey, Leary, McKenna, there are the books I devoured from Shake, Urrà, Castelvecchi. What's certain is that all that baggage of inspirations needed a personal filter, since, as an inhabitant of the Emilian provinces, of the countryside, I was interested in hybridization, or rather in the clash between modernity, technology and tradition, archaicness. Being a provincial myself, I considered it even more provincial to quote slavishly, so everything had to be brought down into everyday life. The places and ways of the territory had to be transfigured; the track “Provincia Exotica,” as you rightly recall, is an example of this, a soundtrack, the tale of a drift, a lysergic journey through a hyperreal jungle among a fauna either endangered or surviving an apocalypse. “Mondariso” is another example, circular loops, slide guitars, stretched-out sounds onto which the choirs of the Mondine di Correggio are grafted, a group my grandmother was part of. Ultimately, this modus operandi, the disorientation, the blending of highbrow and popular, the avant-garde used to contaminate the countryside, the reading of different planes of reality, the abstractions, are the thread that ties together pretty much all of my output, beyond the musical one, my books, the eponymous “Provincia Exotica” and the latest one, “Quando gli alieni rapivano le mucche.”

Is the season of the Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti, of Dischi del Mulo and of everything that was happening in Italy in the '90s something unrepeatable? Looking back on it today, what do you think happened? How come there suddenly seemed to be room for independent music and for languages like folk, rock, punk and so on, even on television? And how come it ended?

I believe the CPI and Dischi del Mulo experience was unique, and I'm afraid unrepeatable. The insight behind it was to be a factory that went beyond individual productions or individual names, and instead thought in terms of shared projects, of developing a scene, of creating a movement that was first cultural and then musical. Another concrete and strategic reason was positioning itself halfway between artistic independence and the support/budget/distribution guaranteed by a major. Naturally, the contribution of figures like Zamboni, Ferretti, Maroccolo, Canali etc. was fundamental in navigating the workings of the Italian record industry, and in the same way their own experience was an important starting point. The CPI/Dischi del Mulo artists, from the biggest to the smallest, found ways to intersect paths, to collaborate, to share stages, tours, booking, recording studios, management, press office, promotion, opportunities offered by the media. As for why it ended, everyone can have their own take, and probably a number of factors need to be considered - I'll throw a few out there: growing pains, signs that even by the late '90s already hinted at the social-cultural shifts of the 2000s, such as the increasing retreat into single, atomized identities, the fragmentation of the alternative scene into small, self-referential cliques, a certain extreme snobbery among the new generation and the new journalism tied to webzines. Then there's the great misunderstanding that also arose in the 2000s, when pop music was forcibly absorbed into the term indie, a phenomenon that gradually changed tastes and languages in a pop direction. Ultimately, the Consorzio was the equivalent (with different sounds and words, but with a shared ideal drive and spirit) of what Cramps represented in the Seventies, just as the flourishing of independent labels, fanzines and venues in the Eighties was the background from which the work of the Consorzio and Dischi del Mulo developed in the Nineties. Punk, post-punk, Italian new wave, electronic music, avant-rock, experimentation - these were the roots of all of us; I confess I never understood the rehabilitation of artists who had little to do with that world of ours. Another shift that overturned the whole concept of production was the transformation of formats into immaterial files: digital platforms offered a different way of presenting, listening to and consuming music, faster, more instant, tied to attention spans that demanded slogans, to shrinking timeframes of attention. Knowing how to handle technology revolutionized both methods and timing. Of course there were also internal problems within CPI/Dischi del Mulo, personal reasons too that led to breakups and arguments - no point in going back over what happened, though I'd add that there was probably an overproduction of albums and bands, and a myriad of side releases. Some projects still strike me as controversial today, while collective albums like "Materiale resistente" and "Matrilineare" still retain a strong idealistic and innovative drive. By contrast, the album dedicated to Robert Wyatt forcibly involved names that could certainly help the compilation stand out nationally or internationally, but some of them had nothing to do with the story or the poetics of the musician - in fact they openly admitted they had no idea who he was. I'll add that at the time I was a bit disappointed not to have been able to take part myself. It's an episode that came to mind, but perhaps it was a sign of a somewhat overestimated overproduction - after the success of CSI, there was probably an expectation that it would pull the rest of the bands toward commercial growth, but instead it was also the beginning of the end. These are all just hypotheses, and there are surely others, but that said, it was a dense, creative, courageous period. I'm truly grateful to those who involved me in that wonderful story.

Speaking of television, Red Ronnie had a truly rare quality: curiosity. He would ask the artists appearing on his show to suggest videos by musicians they admired, and when Ustmamò suggested one by Afa, saying you were "little known", he promptly invited you into the studio. You too have always been keen on introducing people to things, on spreading the word. In your view, what spaces are there today for discovering new things? Does the "guiding" role once played by critics, experts or TV hosts still exist, or, with the Internet, has the search become more self-directed?

Yes, it really did happen just as you described: Ustmamò, during an episode of Help, put forward the video for "Fossili", and from then on we were repeatedly invited both to Help and to Roxy Bar. Red Ronnie, beyond his appreciation of the music, was particularly struck by the theorizing and the concepts behind albums like "Nomade psichico", "Manipolazioni" and "Armonico". He really gave me a lot of space, and I could afford to speak freely, spelling out the ideas and explorations that were engaging me artistically and intellectually at the time. That constant exposure, and a use of television as a means to learn about things, to discover, perhaps even to educate curiosity, made all the difference, and we found ourselves with a packed calendar of dates and growing interest from the audience. It's not true that you only have to give people easy, harmless stuff, the so-called crap - that's a somewhat classist, racist idea; little by little we've accepted a race to the bottom, and artists themselves have gone through a kind of self-censorship and self-castration. Red Ronnie was one example (already toward the end of the Seventies, when as a music journalist he did pioneering work spreading new music), and then there were other channels and shows, both on TV and radio, and in any case it wasn't hard to get airtime on RAI or other broadcasters. Then, radio networks and commercial TV flattened everything out. There are still spaces to be found today, but they no longer have that power to influence; the few remaining music magazines have ever-lower circulation and are aimed more at industry insiders - a nice review or a nice piece is always gratifying, satisfying, but it no longer moves the needle the way it once did. So we come back to the Internet, which we all use by now, a Babel-like, labyrinthine thing; I often lose myself in a thousand branches and tributaries. In my case, I search constantly, but I notice that the paths are often already laid out in advance, and at a certain point you feel lost, numbed - in a single lifetime we'll never manage to give a listen or pay attention to every path, to every work that's offered to us or that we come across online. In the end, the autonomy of a personal search depends on prior experience and on innate curiosity. Lately I find myself browsing and making discoveries on Bandcamp, following the columns and tips from The Wire, Quietus or the Italian magazine Blow Up; the famous bubble of virtual friendships, the discussion groups, let people share discoveries, revelations, new trends. But you have to be aware that these are niches, enclaves, almost esoteric sects.

Besides Afa and your solo career you have a great many projects, the most recent of which is "Energumeni". Can you tell us about it?

Lots of projects, not much money... joking aside, I don't think I've ever made an album that resembled another, even within the same project. I like to look at my path as a whole; at times I've betrayed and unsettled people who followed me or knew me for certain sounds, but I've always wanted to experiment with new things, to take risks, even at the cost of heading in contradictory directions - the one common thread being crosscutting, obliqueness, the goal of fusing the highbrow and the popular, experimentation and song. En Manque D'Autre, AFA (Acid Folk Alleanza), Groove Safari, Duozero, Roots Connection, Ajello, Babel, IRRS, Impresa Gottardo, and of course the solo albums. Today there's yet another step, yet another challenge, totally free, anarchic, aleatory, reckless, built on improvisation and exploration. "Energumeni" is the new venture that finds me in cahoots with Manitù Rossi, who together with Vittore Baroni gives life to Le Forbici di Manitù. Our increasingly close collaboration with Le Forbici sparked a further step toward a duo record. That record is getting very positive reactions, which highlight the total creative freedom involved. It's a bold, visionary double LP that moves through territory that might recall free-form excursions, psychtronica, avant-rock, kraut, weird jazz, Canterbury, no wave, post-punk, Dadaist deconstructions and assemblages, ethno-dub, post-industrial suggestions - but these labels should be taken only as vague points of reference, because the result is thoroughly unusual.

Imagining that this interview will also be read by people who don't know you, what listening would you suggest as a way into your music?

It's not an easy thing, and I often think that exploring my body of work could be misleading - I've never used music instrumentally to secure myself a career. You might stumble into absolute, uncompromising experimentation just as easily as into little pop tunes; you might come across songs that on first listen you'd call singer-songwriter material, songwriting, only to then discover I've also done Italo disco, noise, electronic blues, ethnic music; you might discover the early AFA records, close to crossover, to trashy ballroom dance music, to a kind of deviant folk music, and then compare them with AFA after the trip to Namibia, with the field recordings of the Bushmen. Who knows! All of this stuff, and plenty more, is nonetheless part of a single path of mine - a bumpy one, sure, with a thousand branches, digressions, trespasses, at times moments of getting lost, but I get bored, and I would have gotten bored if I'd had a one-note discography, without surprises, challenges and, why not, missteps. In any case, I'll try: I'd say the first AFA album, "Acid Folk Alleanza", and by contrast "Nomade psichico"; as for the solo albums, the latest one, "Resa incondizionata", and for the more experimental side, "Energumeni".

Your creative and musical interests range across different forms and genres, but one distinctive element of your solo career - and of En Manque d'Autre and Afa - is the song form, a tool that I imagine nicely combines your interest in literature and lyric writing with your musical side. Was this a deliberate choice or a natural path? And what do you think is the current "state of health" of the Italian song?

Yes, despite my use of more open forms - see the latest "Energumeni" - the song form has always been the framework I work within the most. It's a natural choice, going back to when I was a child inventing odd little songs, then through En Manque D'Autre and AFA, up to the seven solo albums where I delved deeper into songwriting. Often my most recent songs are linked by a common thread, by an idea, to the point of building concept albums. I confirm what you're saying - the song is a container, a tool that lets me bring together lyrics, literature, thought and music. Not only that: in my songs I've always included oblique elements, dissonances, risky choices; I've always admired artists who managed to stay right on the border between song and experimentation, between communication and research. In short, I've always been drawn to what's called "intelligent song", but I haven't been afraid to get my hands dirty in the pop world, especially when pop music brings innovation to sound, language, aesthetics. I like the phrase "popular avant-garde" (no political reference intended), especially when elements from other fields find their way into that framework. It's a long and well-documented story, starting with the Beatles, for instance, capable of writing melodically perfect songs while still being curious enough to surprise listeners with references to John Cage and contemporary music, to psychedelia, to Indian music, to pastiche, to inventions and to the use of the recording studio. As for Italian song, which reached real heights if we think back over past decades, I have to say that starting with the new singer-songwriters of the 2000s, a kind of citationism took hold, leading to a formulaic quality, an aridity that settled comfortably into the mannerisms of Italian music's historic names. Mind you, among the new singer-songwriters there are also very talented people, technically well trained, but who, aside from a few exceptions, haven't managed to move beyond quoting, beyond drawing on existing, established models. Another issue: the old-school singer-songwriters had the time and space to mature, to build their own path, to refine their own originality; they were figures shaped by a particular historical-social period, and they knew how to tell that story album after album. Sure, records had to sell back then too, but it wasn't an obsession, wasn't the only condition. Today everything has to be resolved within a tiny window of time - a single, maybe an album, the creation of some hype that then dissolves amid empty stadiums and nervous breakdowns. And let's not forget how homogenizing it is to listen to songs written by the same handful of authors - Sanremo is the emblem of this, with tracks penned by the usual names. A song with 10 names credited for writing childish lyrics, with easy slogans, with English rhymes and internet-speak, all seasoned with melodic writing that leans toward the saccharine, or toward the kind of tacky tune you'd imagine playing at a holiday resort. In Italian song today I find the same formal vices as recent Italian cinema: introspection, sentimentality, broken hearts, generational failure, social disillusionment, retreating into the private sphere. That said, I'm always ready to acknowledge a beautiful song, even if I have to go a long way back, to Faust'O/Fausto Rossi, to find new forms close to my own sensibility.

(April 5, 2026)

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