Csi

What is an album by the Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti doing at the top of Italy's best-selling albums chart? That's the obvious question on 15 September 1997, when the latest Fimi/Nielsen survey shows Giovanni Lindo Ferretti's band knocking none other than Oasis – the decade's biggest Britpop phenomenon – and their "Be Here Now" off the top of the national hit parade. It will last just one week – after all, it's always been said that good things don't last long – and total sales won't be much higher than the average for previous Csi releases (eighty thousand copies), but it will stand as the seal on a musical revolution entirely rooted in the '90s: Italian alternative rock was conquering the market and proving all its commercial potential, unsuspected until that moment. The label executives at Black Out/PolyGram, who had bet everything on Consorzio with their eyes closed, could rub their hands with glee. Many others instead – including mainstream journalists and industry insiders – were asking themselves another, more radical question: just who on earth are this Csi?

(In)fidelity to the Line

The Csi – as is well known – were nothing more than the natural continuation of one of the most radical and irreverent experiences in Italian (post-)punk: that of Cccp – Fedeli alla linea, back in the spotlight this very year with a series of initiatives marking 40 years since the release of the EP "Ortodossia": from the exhibition "Felicitazioni! Cccp – Fedeli alla linea. 1984 – 2024" at the Chiostri di San Pietro in Reggio Emilia, to the release of the box set "Felicitazioni!", which collects eighteen historic tracks by Ferretti's band plus various memorabilia, all the way to the triple performance of "Cccp in Dddr", "the show that unites pro-Soviet punk and melodic Emilian music at the beating heart of the Dismantled Republic of East Germany", staged at the Astra Kulturhaus in Berlin (24, 25 and 26 February 2024). A well-deserved tribute to an experience that was pivotal for the entire Italian rock scene: that of a provincial Italian band that managed to defile everything that could be considered traditionally Italian, from the pop ditty to ballroom dancing, mincing it all in a punk blender at supersonic speed.

But to consider Csi merely a more reassuring version of the original incarnation – as many have tried to do – would be deeply wrong: these are in fact two equally innovative and experimental groups, whose impact left an equally significant mark on the Italian scene of the time. The new incarnation, born amid the rubble of the Berlin Wall, would necessarily (though actually with considerable irony) have to adopt the new acronym of the dissolving former Soviet empire: Csi (CIS). On 8 December 1991, indeed, with the signing of the Belavezha Accords by the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine at a dacha in the Białowieża Forest, the end of the Soviet Union as a subject of international law was declared, and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was established in its place. A few days earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned as head of state of the dying USSR.

Ferretti and his companions remain “faithful to the line” and follow it to its logical conclusion. They will become Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti. Not a band, but a genuine “supergroup”. What remained of the original Cccp (Ferretti and Zamboni, the Emilian core) merges with the Tuscan contingent exiting Litfiba, made up of bassist Gianni Maroccolo and keyboardist Francesco Magnelli, who had already contributed to Cccp's last album, “Epica Etica Etnica Pathos”, alongside their sound engineer and guitarist, Giorgio Canali. Singer Ginevra Di Marco, Magnelli's future wife, also joins the lineup permanently, while Fatur and Annarella leave the group.

Two masterpieces, “Ko de mondo” (1994) - a scathing collage of thoughts and existential reflections scattered across contemporary life - and “Gothic Line” (1996) - almost a concept album born from the pain of the tragic events of those years in the former Yugoslavia - had already shown how, despite the lineup changes, for Ferretti and his companions it had always been “a matter of quality”. Meanwhile, the gaunt shaman of the Emilian Apennines, with his vibrant, mystical and magnetic poetics, had risen to the status of guru of the Italian alternative rock scene, to the point of gathering around CSI a whole constellation of assorted artists and musicians. A sort of factory, including bands like Disciplinatha and Üstmamò, with whom CSI shared the stage on 18 September 1992 at the Festival delle Colline, held at the Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato. Some of the most stimulating avant-garde acts of the national underground took turns on stage for what was meant to be a one-off event, but which would grow into a mini-tour in February 1993. That concert would remain etched in collective memory thanks to the classic live album “Maciste contro tutti”.

CSI thus become the beacon of the thriving national indie-rock scene. Because - as Lorenzo Salzano points out in our landmark feature on “Linea gotica” - they use punk “not as a slavish rehash of outdated stylistic tropes or ideologies, but as a form of sonic asceticism, reduced to the ferocity of an electric guitar, because, faced with the unspeakable, any further embellishment would lack both force and decency”. The same is demanded of the words: “That they say only what is true and necessary, as if wrenched by force from the grip of a silence that the annihilated soul demands. In the end, it's the same intransigence as when Cccp titled their first record 'Ortodossia'”.

In Italy, these are years of dramatic political upheaval and judicial battles. The years of Tangentopoli and the collapse of the First Republic, but also of the rise to power of an unsettling new centre-right, led by Silvio Berlusconi. The global political landscape is also shifting rapidly, with Bill Clinton bringing the Democrats back to the White House, after the long Reagan and Bush era, through his centrist “Third Way”, reconciling traditional free-market economic positions with progressive social policy. Along similar - or almost similar - lines is Tony Blair's rise in the United Kingdom, sending the British Labour Party back to Number Ten Downing Street after a very long exile in opposition: eighteen years spent out of government, between the iron years of Margaret Thatcher and the greyer ones of John Major.

While at the time still faithful to the line (Ferretti's recent political transformation is well known to everyone), CSI gradually drift away from the political arena, pursuing existential and philosophical reflections rather than the old militant slogans. Even when they have to reckon with the Cupe vampe engulfing the Balkans, they fly higher, driven by increasingly hermetic and ascetic lyrics that Ferretti also draws from his complex paths of spiritual search. Yet a single verse like “Ci fotte la guerra che armi non ha, ci fotte la pace che ammazza qua e là, ci fottono i preti, i pope e i mullah” manages to explain the war in Yugoslavia better than any treatise on geopolitics.

Journey to Mongolia

Breaking the successful routine of the “Gothic Line” tour comes a message from a Mongolian bureaucrat, from the country Ferretti had dreamed of visiting since childhood: the tourist visa, applied for years earlier without much hope, had been granted in exchange for a small payment to the official in charge. The invitation was addressed to the singer himself and his companion Zamboni, united by a shared passion for those endless steppes: “As a child I dreamed of Mongolia, it was for me a space of fantasy entirely my own,” the bard of Cerreto Alpi would later recall. “I had chosen it because my school textbook described it as the last place on earth where nomads still existed, where all the men were shepherds, herders and hunters, where the sky was full of eagles and the land full of animals. When Massimo told me he had the same passion, I couldn't believe it.” And the others? They had to be convinced to interrupt the tour.

To pull it off, the two organise a lavish lunch with the whole band at a traditional trattoria, “Canossa” in Reggio Emilia: “We stuffed them with cappelletti, boiled meats, roasts, desserts and endless Lambrusco,” Ferretti would later recall with amusement to Sky Arte on an episode of “33 giri: Italian Masters”. “We made it clear that Massimo and I had to leave, and that the others could join at most. In the end only the two of us went, but that's where the tour ended.”

And so Ferretti and Zamboni set off. They travel across the Trans-Siberian railway, amid the wreckage of the Soviet technological dream. A journey of 5,700 kilometres that takes them across boundless, inhospitable lands. It will be documented in the book “In Mongolia in retromarcia”, in Davide Ferrario's docu-film “Sul 45º parallelo”, and in a series of documentaries for Geo & Geo (Rai 3) directed by Marco Preti. Every aspect of that journey would have to find its way into the grooves of the new record: the experiences, the sounds, the flavours, the atmospheres of those surreal landscapes of earth, sky and dust, often populated more by animals than by people.

Back home, the two friends begin pouring all that imagery into words and sounds. Easy enough for someone like Ferretti, for whom nomadism (of geography, but also of culture) had become his very reason for being. Less predictable, however, was that the other members of the band managed to keep pace, quickly immersing themselves in that world: “It was as if they had made the journey too,” Zamboni would later comment. Ginevra Di Marco's splendid voice, Gianni Maroccolo's monumental bass - a pillar of Italian independent rock since the early Litfiba days - Francesco Magnelli's atmospheric keyboards and Giorgio Canali's fiery guitar: everything contributes to that miracle of cohesion and chemistry known as “Electrified tabula rasa”.

The title carries a double meaning: abbreviated, it becomes TRE, indicating that this is the Consorzio's third album; written out in full, it's instead a powerful image of a Mongolia made entirely of plains and boundless expanses, crossed only by power poles with broken wires - a visual testament to the impossibility of electrifying those harsh lands and, ultimately, to the collapse of the entire communist system. It's a symbol of annihilation, a scorched earth, a total purification: a tabula rasa, but electrified, as if to foreshadow, at the dawn of globalism, an unceasing communication made of power poles, energies, exchanges between these far-flung territories and the civilised world. Because, even while moving away from their early pro-communist positions, Ferretti and his companions kept their fiercely critical view of the West unchanged. What changed, however, was the angle and the overall perspective. Their gaze returned to the purity of the earth and of boundless spaces in order to pillory the superficiality and suffocating conformism of the Western consumerist world.

Everything, as has been said, leads back to Mongolia, even the splendid cover image: a pictorial intervention on a series of photos taken by the two friends during the trip. But - in Ferretti's own words - “'Electrified tabula rasa' is not an exotic record, still less an ethnological or folksy one; it might be the only rock record in the history of Cccp/CSI”. Just listen to believe it: the single released well ahead of the album, in a radio version specially prepared by PolyGram, with the instrumental intro cut out to plunge straight into the heart of the verse. “'Forma e sostanza' came out of a collective jam late at night,” Maroccolo would recall. “It was our lever for getting discovered by radio stations and other media that didn't consider alternative rock music. It made us popular and at the same time condemned us to oblivion: it's thanks to that song that we went from playing theatres to playing big arenas. We weren't able to handle that pressure, but at least we went out in style.” It's not hard to understand the reasons for that success: “Forma e sostanza” is a genuine sonic bomb, with those razor-sharp feedback squalls, that broken rhythmic melody, and that obsessive android loop that sounds like a wah-wah guitar effect but was actually invented by Magnelli on keyboards. And then there's the lyric: “A jumble of philosophical thoughts strung together in the simplest way possible,” according to Ferretti's own definition, who, with a tone both ironic and aggressive, chants his liberating slogan/chorus: "I want what's owed to me, I want it because it's mine, it's waiting for me". A defining anthem for an entire era, the golden age of Italian alternative rock in the Nineties, of which they claimed a sort of primacy, if not outright leadership.

Champions of Italian rock

Recorded in the studio between January and March 1997 in Carpineti, in the province of Reggio Emilia, and released in August of that same year, “Electrified tabula rasa” hits the national rock scene like an earthquake. A display of solemn, irreverent power, a disorienting mix of sweet and violent songs that embrace all the contradictions of life under the Mongolian sky. Superbly produced, with layers of guitars piled on layers of distorted guitars, and above them a constant shimmer of keyboards and cymbals in the more powerful sections, alternating with quiet passages led by the bass, soft drums and brief breaths of keyboard or guitar. A record that displays all the ambitions of a band that - perhaps unknowingly - was breaking out of the ghetto, out of the comfort zone in which it had confined itself for years. But not everyone was ready to grasp the scope of that revolution. Just consider the famous gaffe by Gianni Boncompagni, who, scandalised, mistook the song's title for the band's name: “Bocelli is now the number one in the world and has been topping the English sales charts for weeks, while over here at the top of the hit parade there's a band called Tabula Rasa Elettrificata that nobody, not even the Macao crowd, has ever heard of!”. There would also be those, even within the ranks of Italy's own underground, who showed unseemly signs of envy, like Freak Antoni, leader of Skiantos, author of a spiteful j'accuse: “That contrived, horribilating (= horrible + horrendous) Consorzio-Suonatori-Indipendenti, which instantly brings to mind images of a dairy farm in the Emilian lowlands. Independent from whom? From what? Certainly not from the record business, on whose waves they sail in fine style, like busy, well-organised small entrepreneurs who own their own nationally successful label. A whiff of socialist propaganda poster, well beyond the merely dated and far past the naivety of unintentional kitsch, and therefore a calculated understatement. Highly appetising to the cultured elite of journalists and the trendiest intellectuals. A grand con job for suckers thirsty for cultural commitment and artistic rigour. Who bite like pike.”.

"Mimporta 'nasega", Ferretti would ideally – and in fact actually – reply, well aware of the sheer strangeness of the situation that had come about. Csi would soon vanish from the top of the charts, relieving many industry insiders and mainstream commentators of their awkward position. But something extraordinary and irreversible had already taken place.

It's not just the success of "Forma e sostanza" that explains the miracle. Because the whole album works, unleashing a powerful, stunning wall of sound in which Ferretti's aphasic, chant-like vocals cut through like a sharp blade. In place of Cccp's pro-Soviet punk, bitter accounts of the collapse of the great Bolshevik design are wedged in. As among the two-stringed Mongolian violins, the spectral keyboards and the noise guitars of "Unità di produzione" (dedicated to Moscow), where the forced development of the economy clashes with the resisting force of the earth itself, which "cannot be raised": “Sogno tecnologico bolscevico/ Atea mistica meccanica/ Macchina automatica, no anima/ Macchina automatica, no anima/ Ecco la terra in permanente rivoluzione/ Ridotta imbelle sterile igienica/ Una unità di produzione”. It's a complete rupture, an inner one too for Ferretti, who would later cut every tie with his past as a communist militant, without ever disowning it.

Always hieratic and solemn in his declamations, the frontman manages to plant complex textual jabs even behind the apparent simplicity of the irreverent, uptempo "Mimporta 'nasega": “Probabili cadute su disastri annunciati/ Connessioni smarrite tempi mal calcolati/ L’apocalisse è quello che c’è già/ Mistica Bio Meccanica/ Eonica soap opera puntate quotidiane/ Assegnate le parti corrono le comparse”. He manages to take centre stage in the songs, showing an almost cinematic attitude on "Vicini", where the trip-hop beat is torn open by searing guitar distortions and by another of his explosive choruses, and he all but takes your breath away on the relentless "Accade", where he repeats the phrase "ciò che deve accadere accade" a full eighteen times in a row.

Other tracks sound more languid, reflective, like the ode to an Asia more imagined than real that is "Brace" – with Ginevra Di Marco's soft voice offsetting the electricity of the chorus – or the visionary "Ongii", a haunting snapshot of the Mongolian landscape dedicated to the river of the same name, once over four hundred kilometres long, recalling the madness of the Soviets' destruction of the Ongijn Hijd monastery complex in 1939, or again the hypnotic prayer of "Gobi", woven around the Mongolian mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum", and the evocative "Bolormaa", which tells the story of a child contortionist and once again puts the spotlight on the vocalist with another spine-tingling performance.

Di Marco is another added value of the record: she proves a supple, versatile interpreter, even capable of mimicking the traditional singing of Mongolian women in the vocal layering of the punk-tinged "Matrilineare", a successful ode to matriarchal society both today and in the past. But the whole band is on fire. Magnelli's keyboards paint abstract scenery with psychedelic shades, the guitars of Zamboni and Canali scratch furiously, oscillating between noise-rock and shoegaze, while Maroccolo's obsessive bass drives a rhythm section in which Gigi Cavalli Cocchi's drumming manages to be both lean and tumultuous at once.

An unrepeatable alchemy that would bewitch plenty of critics and musicians too. Take Franco Battiato, for instance, who wrote about it in the best possible review: "An exceptional record. I think all the tracks are very interesting… In "Bolormaa" there's a wonderful line: 'Monito terrorista che la retta è per chi ha fretta'… A record, to put it briefly, that's apocalyptic. Though one must be careful using that word in its original sense of revelation. A record that belongs to a Nordic existential worldview, with an idea of revolution not in its destructive sense. A revolutionary record."

Worn out by success

As mentioned, the commercial phenomenon of "Electrified tabula rasa" turned out to be disorienting and ultimately even unmanageable for a group like Csi, effectively destined to break up just as it reached the peak of its popularity. Perhaps unwittingly, the Consorzio had ventured into territory ill-suited to its own approach and working method. At first, though, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti weathered the shockwave and tried in some way to "justify" the unexpected conquest of the top of the charts: "It's striking that Csi should suddenly find themselves in first place, for a week, on the chart of best-selling records in Italy," the frontman wrote in La Repubblica's Musica supplement on 1 October 1997, "And why on earth not? Music lives on and feeds off irreconcilable contradictions (…) it is the place of tumultuous growth, of the deepest experiences, it is the intimate space of personal and, at times, collective freedom. Music is the realm of complexity and the paradigm of our world in these years (…) Music has the power to transform individuals, to shape society. It is fleeting, ever-changing, elusive and yet structured, rigid, unyielding (…) Only a small, provincial and therefore subordinate market can be surprised that Csi are number one on the chart. It should instead feel necessary, like a breath of fresh air. Promising. I look forward to seeing Üstmamò there, and then Marlene Kuntz, and then… Then modern Italian music will prove to itself that it has grown up."

Soon after, indeed, other Italian records would emerge to consolidate a scene that seemed ever more lively and thriving: from Marlene Kuntz's “Ho ucciso paranoia” to Afterhours's “Non è per sempre”, from Scisma's “Armstrong” to Verdena's self-titled album, from Almamegretta's “Lingo” to Prozac +'s “Acidoacida”. A season that, unfortunately, faded away prematurely as the decade turned, also due to the progressive decline of rock's centrality in the tastes of younger audiences.

But above all, before long, the Consorzio's utopia would also fade away. The pressure of a music business that was distorting the very essence of the group was too strong. There were borderline episodes, such as the summer dates as support act on Jovanotti's tour, criticised by some fans, but also the sheer scale of the "Mimporta 'nasega Tour" itself, which kicked off in Florence on 3 February 1998 for 53 shows, all sold out. Another memorable performance was the one documented on the live album "La terra, la guerra, una questione privata", released in January '98 but recorded two years earlier, dedicated to the partisan Beppe Fenoglio. The first frictions between Ferretti and Zamboni – which culminated in a definitive split on 22 September 1999 in Berlin, the very city where it had all begun – along with the rest of the band's struggle to adapt to this new dimension, opened up irreparable cracks. But it would be another historic event, the live show in the war-torn city of Mostar, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that would ideally bring things full circle. "Csi ended in the former Yugoslavia: when we played in Mostar, in the stadium that had been used as a concentration camp, we somehow crossed the line between music and life," Ferretti would explain.

After the band broke up in 2002, some former Csi members went on to form Pgr (Per grazia ricevuta), while Giovanni Lindo Ferretti launched several other projects, both musical and literary, later unsettling his old die-hard fans with his support for positions close to the right wing and to the most conservative strand of Catholicism (though he later tried to soften the blow with the nostalgic Cccp reunion of 2023). But that's a whole other story. As is the rather bizarre tale of a "botched" 2020 reissue, in which Universal used premixes instead of the final master, letting inaccuracies, omissions and even some stray off-mic voices slip through: the label patched things up a few weeks later by reissuing the record properly.

What will remain for posterity are the songs of an unrepeatable (super)group, a symbol of a musical counterculture, of an irreverent, ruthless assault on the system, which carried the Italian alternative audience through two decades. But there will also remain the regret of never again being able to see them at work right when they had reached the peak of their chemistry.

(Taken from the volume "1997" in "The Past" editorial series)

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22/02/2026