Above The Tree

The live show from the solo project of Marche-born Marco Bernacchia, Above The Tree, is a real coup for Flat, a recently opened club-association right in the heart of Mestre.

Already responsible for a number of notable projects (Mazca, Gallina, Al!arm), with Above The Tree and his official records (“Blue Revenge” and “Minimal Love”) Bernacchia has shown a rare creative versatility and a seriously oblique compositional personality, one that with his highly shape-shifting acoustic organisms has by now ripened into genuine mastery.

Expectations for his live set were therefore high, and Bernacchia doesn't disappoint. First of all, there's the purely live dimension. While the artist himself acknowledges his debt to Animal Collective and the international weird-folk scene, Above The Tree caught live actually comes across as even more alien than on record. His constructions are extremely daring (“In The Middle Of”, “Emigrated Heaven”), rendered almost baroque by the composer, sung in extraterrestrial tongues yet imbued with a sincere, tender humanity, shaped and reshaped almost to the point of sonic implosion.

Then there's the visual impact of the show. There's the bare-bones staging of the dead branch left stranded in the background (the talisman of the “Tree”) and his grotesque android-rooster mask (not to mention the inflatable sculpture that bursts out of nowhere and takes over part of the crowd, or the buzzing vacuum cleaner pushed through the audience that closes the set), but also quasi-symbolic, less flashy elements, such as the specially customised acoustic guitar, the wall of effects and loops, the “found” percussion and the contact microphones.

These, then, are not simply musical instruments, but elements of interaction with his musical ego, with his surroundings, the space around him, and with the audience, as in the “panic” opening of “Waiting Song”, with a phenomenal Bernacchia conjuring whirlwinds of non-sound with just voice and loops, in perfect kinship with Wyatt's “End Of An Ear”.

Finally, there's the very essence of his art, almost an anomalous outgrowth of the environment itself, such is its dose of phantasmagoria, of imaginary additions, of lysergic figures thrown together at random. On crooked trips like “Ta-Ta-Ta-T” and “30% of… ♥” Bernacchia takes on the guise of a Barrett brooding over his last incomprehensible mumblings, still managing to conjure unexpected peaks of sorcery from them.

Overall, his ease in picking sounds and chord progressions, which he then strips down in cauldrons of overlapping layers, touches, tickings, interference and even bone-on-bone beats (“Disconnected Head”), makes him the first true wizard of Italian rock.

Widely underrated (though by now ready to be launched on a bigger scale), Above The Tree's set is almost a paradigm of the unconscious; its solid avant-garde footing shines throughout its brief duration (unfortunately so, because it's inglorious, and fortunately so, because it's intense), and it even tries to leave egocentric ideas behind, preferring instead to aim for interaction, for the feedback of wonder and joy. A good (and unexpected) turnout from the crowd.

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