Uochi Toki "Set Legno"

An event-show for the homegrown duo Uochi Toki at the now-renowned Unwound Club in Padua. Napo (Matteo Palma, vocals) and Rico (Riccardo Gamondi), backed by a genuine rhythm section made up of Bruno Dorella on drums and Lucio Corenzi on double bass, stage what they themselves call a "set legno" ("wood set") to explore the torrential hip-hop scenarios of their last two studio albums.

Both "Audiobook" and — perhaps even more so — "Heart love error disintegration" overturn the original premises of their electronic rap, once splintered into nuclear shards on records like "Vokapatch" and "Uochi Toki". The live show, armed with skilled supporting musicians, serves to push that transition even further and to explore its new frontiers with full awareness. Stripped of any hardcore residue, Uochi Toki now lay out their free-form stories with serene, almost seraphic calm.

First and foremost, there's a dichotomy — or perhaps a confluence — of two aspects worth noting. Napo delivers streams of consciousness that almost always explode into sprawling, philosophizing invectives, or collapse into Joyce-ian interior monologues, intellectualized yet only loosely tethered to a youthful register. Here and there, genuine "sceneggiate" (theatrical narrative outbursts typical of Neapolitan song) surface, accompanied live by the gestures of a crowd-rousing orator, though aimed at themes diametrically opposed to those of a propaganda rally. His pantomimic, anti-melismatic rhapsodies (almost always delivered with a cadence more transcendent than angry), which reach peaks of verbose vertigo on the Dalek-esque "Permettendomi artifici spontanei", rest on spatialized themes capable of turning an everyday snapshot into a universal blunder, or a convoluted train of thought that cannibalizes itself. His words are no longer even "free verse", but true verbal spaces of enunciation.

That's not to say the power lets up. If anything, Rico, handling accompaniment and backing tracks, is more than ever chasing his own personal "Metal Machine Music" across tracks like "L'osservatore", "Appena risalito dall'abisso" and "Che mi esaspera fino ad esplodere la realtà in molteplici 'adesso'". At times, though, it all turns impressionistic, as if a sound engineer were running quality control on cracks, fissures and electronic seepage, only to twist them back into deafening drills. His extended rides (notably the 11 minutes of "Dato che per me è naturale trovarmi spaesato nei non-luoghi") bring out the subconscious, the repressed, the unsettling underside of Napo's stream-of-consciousness narratives.

As if that weren't enough, the rhythm section — a stripped-down drum kit (no bass drum, as with OvO or a stylized Zu) and an electrified double bass — ratchets up the tension further. Dorella's drumming ranges from mimicking hip-hop to jazz syncopation, from imitating doom-metal's double bass drum (here doubled toms) to the heavy roar of industrial metal. The bass rarely just accompanies; if anything, it's the most unrestrained, improvisation-prone instrument, the true counterweight to Napo's voice: at once an avant-garde chamber instrument, an atonal noise phrasing, a pure soundscape, and even a sharp percussive voice.

The "set-legno" is, in its own way, the triumph of Uochi Toki, and — ultimately — the new benchmark for experimental hip-hop on the Italian scene: a monolithic dance around the borderline (where the borderline stands for more than just the intersection of genres), a shamanic invocation of everyday contemporaneity, a micro-macro motion that inexorably plunges into terrible abysses of apathy.

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