Bluvertigo - Morgan - Futurist Pop

Loved and loathed in equal measure, Marco Castoldi, known as Morgan, is a figure as imposing as he is elusive within the Italian music scene, scattered across countless identities: rocker, decadent dandy, writer, gossip-column fixture, musical encyclopedist, mainstream TV star, ringmaster of the Premio Tenco. No one else seems able to juggle so many different languages and modes of expression while emerging miraculously unscathed. To untangle this complicated web, it's necessary to start from the aspect that represents both the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of the "Morgan phenomenon": simply put, the music.

Monza, 1986: Marco Castoldi (Morgan) meets Andrea Fumagalli (Andy), beginning a friendship that would bind them together over the years. Rounding out the lineup is an acquaintance of theirs, Fabiano Villa. In 1989 they manage to land a contract with Polygram, adopting the name Golden Age. In 1990 their first creation is released: "Chains", followed by their first video, made for the single "Secret Love". The following year the band breaks up, setting Morgan and Andy on the path toward what would become Bluvertigo.

In 1992 Morgan, joined by guitarist Marco Pancaldi, produces new material that the band will go on to use. The lineup is rounded out with Andy (keyboards, saxophone, synthesizer) and Stefano Panceri (drums). After Panceri's early departure, help arrives in the form of Sergio Carnevale, met at a music competition held in Monza at the Incantesimo venue. In 1994 the release of the single "Iodio" marks the official existence of Bluvertigo. The song earns them a spot at that year's Sanremo Giovani, bringing their first critical acclaim.

1995 is the year of the release of Acidi e Basi, the first chapter of the so-called chemical trilogy. Morgan explains the concept like this: "There are connections between pop music and chemistry. Pop is the genre that lets you assemble elements, chemical elements in this case, and create molecules; at that point you can take noble gases, you can take any kind of atom and build molecules." Specifically, the three albums have clear references to chemistry, starting with their titles. Indeed, "Acidi e Basi" represents the clash of opposite elements and also a beginning, Metallo Non Metallo is the middle, with its palindromic structure (the central "o," the possibility of shifting the words to either side without effect), and Zero is the end, the cancellation, physical impalpability.

Acidi e Basi only partly conforms to the patterns of the classic debut album. There are clear nods to the typical styles of the era, first and foremost grunge, which was monopolizing the international music scene at the time. The melodic exploration and sonic experimentation don't push as far as they will in the future, yet across the ten songs there are some genuinely interesting ideas to be found. The dissonant guitars often paint finely crafted pop vignettes (the touching "I Still Love You," the dreamy psychedelia of "L.S.D. la sua dimensione"), while the predominant guitar-bass-drums structures are sturdy and lively, at times almost uncontainable (the near-hard-rock edges of "Iodio," "Vivosunamela" and "L'eretico").

The more liquid, dissolved style that would become the hallmark of their future songs starts to emerge in the album's central tracks. Beginning with the brilliantly irreverent lyricism of "Decadenza," we end up appreciating the reworking of "Here Is The House" by Depeche Mode, renamed for the occasion "Complicità." These two rank among the best songs in the band's entire discography, poised between a biting critique of social clichés (the first) and a heartfelt tribute to mutual love (the second).

The intrusion of electronics is still very minimal at this point; the use of synthesizers is merely decorative and barely perceptible (a few hints in "Iodio" and "Decadenza"), yet despite this, those touches give the record a very seductive air of analog craftsmanship. Finally, it's worth highlighting Andy's flair on sax, since his piercing high notes would also be used in the future to mark often decisive moments of melodic break.

The purely lyrical side of these ten songs centers on the mocking irony of the flamboyant Morgan. Not yet fully lost in his infatuation with more grandiloquent lyrics (represented here with discretion and tact by "Storiamediavale," "Complicità" and "I Still Love You"), the album features verses that offer a brazen critique of some of the typical complacencies of our society. It starts with the hypocrisy of the clergy ("L'eretico"), moves on to the standardization of feelings and sensations ("Iodio," "Vivosunamela"), while a disenchanted view of the world and its habits emerges forcefully (with the already mentioned "Decadenza" and "Salvaluomo"). The rejection of materialistic opportunism, typically adolescent in nature, is expressed with originality and contempt ("Il dio denaro").

Still in 1995, the band opened for Oasis's Milan concert, took part in the May Day festival in Rome, and recorded a cover of Franco Battiato's "Prospettiva Nevsky" for a tribute album to the singer-songwriter from Catania. The frantic pace of those years forced Marco Pancaldi to leave for personal reasons; he was replaced by Livio Magnini (already the band's sound engineer), a longtime guitarist who would remain a permanent fixture from then on.

Released in 1997, Metal not Metal is one of those "cases" that should happen more often in the otherwise static Italian scene: a breath of fresh air even compared to a rock scene that was already undergoing major renewal. Bluvertigo confirmed themselves as an alternative not only to the more institutional singer-songwriter tradition, but also to those in the independent scene riding the more or less traditional models of guitar-centric rock.

The choice to play with a hybrid of electronics is, viewed from a distance, thoroughly commendable and innovative. A song like "Fuori dal tempo" might, back in '97, have seemed like nostalgic or belated electropop. In 2009 it instead sounds entirely plausible, perhaps because Eighties electronics, rather than simply coming back into fashion, has only now been fully assimilated into pop's vocabulary. Or perhaps the song's strength simply lies in being a great pop track, with a quality that is indeed "out of time."

The accompanying video drove the album to success almost a year after its release, cleverly capitalizing on the launch of the Mtv Italy channel. Watching the clip today, it looks rather cheap, but what matters is that back then it didn't seem that way at all, for a simple reason: the surprise sparked by Morgan's charisma and the band's carefree, nonconformist attitude. Finally, an ironic band (which doesn't mean unserious, quite the opposite), characters not frozen into rock clichés, but willing to stage a charming little dance routine that recalls, at least on an iconic level, another famous piece of performance art: Franco Battiato's in "Centro di gravità permanente."

It's precisely this "Battiato-ism" that is the other card played by the band, and it consists of seeking another way of writing lyrics in Italian, ideally far removed from the cut-rate "poetry" of so many rockers convinced they're prophets simply because they rhyme in the language of Dante. Morgan's alternative is lyrics that are linguistically close to prose, but ready to ignite with learned references and surreal juxtapositions that defamiliarize even the most banal material. In fact—and the album's two most famous singles surprisingly belong to this category—some songs even propose "thesis-driven" structures: "Fuori dal tempo," for all its lightness, takes aim at a whole vein of utterly anachronistic things and social roles, on which Italy can offer plenty of material: The three-day questionnaire is really out of touch with the times/ almost all the teachers are out of touch with the times…

Bluvertigo are themselves out of time because they know how to draw from different eras and styles, swallowing them whole and creating, through a barrage of citations, something new: pure postmodernism, and something quite different from the new wave revival we've grown used to in this decade, a wave that Morgan and his bandmates arrived at either too early (or too late?) to ride. The fact remains that "Il mio mal di testa" and "Oggi hai parlato troppo" open with guitar riffs very much in line with the independent rock of the time, but "Vertigo Blu" is hysterical funk rock straight out of Berlin-era Bowie, "Altre forme di vita" is Eighties pop à la Depeche Mode and Duran Duran, "Cieli Neri" opens with Mauro Pagani's prog-style flute, and the list could go on.

The game of citations, it should be noted, is never an end in itself but always serves specific purposes. "Cieli neri," with its symbiosis of real instruments and synths, manages to be a refined sonic atmosphere even before being a classic romantic ballad. "Altre forme di vita" starts off electronic and then brings in the leader's powerful bass, resulting in an effect that is thoroughly dance-oriented. In its lightness, the track thus manages to tear down long-standing ideological barriers between alternative and dance music, placing Bluvertigo in an area of cross-contamination similar to the one explored by Subsonica, with whom, not by chance, they would share the single "Discolabirinto" in '99.

The entire sound—dense, organic, cold—is a mediation between Nineties computer-based recording techniques and the desire to revive the elaborate Italian productions of the Seventies: as much as Morgan loves wave music, he certainly doesn't embrace its minimalism, opting instead for an endless layering and stacking, both of sound and of meaning. The perfect complement to the leader's shape-shifting contribution comes from guitar work that is as technical as it is functional, and Andy's delightful synth touches.

It's here, though, that for the first time the endless doubt of Morgan's detractors arises: that all of this might be nothing more than a sterile exercise in style, a cerebral collage game played with pop's vocabulary.

And yet, faced with so much post-grunge emotional over-indulgence, the self-control and sense of structure that the artist displays on this album can hardly be unwelcome, all the more so since visceral moments are not lacking: the rock drive of "So Low" alone is proof enough. Likewise, it's hard not to appreciate the nods to classical music, the pianistic oases or the strings of "Ideaplatonica." The question shouldn't be dodged, though, because the band really does have something to tell us—so much so that, staying true to the conceptual groundwork already laid in the first album, the record seems to offer a kind of derailed autobiography, the description, rather than the narration, of the protagonist's condition amid the "unsettling intellectual discovery of difference and conflict with things, that is, the loss of adolescence." Unease, then, but in a positive sense of openness to the things of the world, which only becomes acceptance once they have been reclaimed, having been turned into creative material.

The emotional testament of the album is probably found in the long finale of "Troppe emozioni," where the mood turns liquid and shadowy, between the leader's ruminating bass, the lysergic guitar arpeggios, the sax's razor cuts, and a Morgan who sounds a bit like David Sylvian and a bit like "The Man Who Sold The World," singing of the sense of emptiness that overtakes anyone who has truly put all of themselves into their work.

Metal not Metal is an album that leans backward in order to lean forward (in time): it's the same operation, applied to rock, that Canzoni dell’appartamento will try to carry out on the Italian singer-songwriter tradition.

Riding the success of the album, the band and its leader find themselves involved in a series of prestigious collaborations with names such as Alice, Antonella Ruggero, and above all Franco Battiato. Morgan's role as bassist on the album "Gommalacca" paves the way for the Catania-born artist's cameo on Bluvertigo's Zero, but above all it marks Castoldi's entry into the "top tier" of Italian music.

In 1999 the circle inevitably closes with Zero – that is, the famous snowfall of '85 – an ambitious, mammoth (more than an hour of music) and extreme work, sixteen songs forming a cauldron where hits, experiments and stylistic gambles coexist. The music expresses itself at its most multifaceted, while the lyrics take a further step toward final completeness. Within the chemical trilogy, Zero represents the ultimate fulfillment, the analysis of non-existence and, consequently, the deepening of the themes connected to it. This is a show of strength: given the complexity deployed on both the lyrical and conceptual level, the band's artistic stature has to come through.

The non-sense blends with deep metaphorical undertones find their sublimation in every track, carrying out sociological and generational analyses of real worth. The exploration of typical anxieties such as periods of crisis or existential doubts is just one of the threads that can be traced ("La Crisi" and "Sono=Sono" are the clearest examples). The hypocrisy of common thinking is criticized in sharp episodes ("Finché saprai spiegarti," "Comprensione," "Punto di non arrivo"), while in other moments it's people's habits that come under fire ("Sovrappensiero," "Niente X Scontato"). There's also room for biting self-irony, often between the lines ("Lo Psicopatico") or blatant ("Autofraintendimento").

Finally, genuine dialectical apocalypses reveal the collective's purely poetic side, where all the elements chase after Morgan's visionary ideas (the troubled streams of consciousness of "Zero") or Andy's (the magnificent vocal duets of "Forse," written and performed together with Morgan).

Turning to the musical side, what stands out is not just the sheer compositional effort, but also the care taken in choosing sounds and tonalities. Not only eighties-style synth-pop, but other references too. The jarring clangs of "Zero" and "Lo psicopatico" are clear nods to industrial dissonance, the final drift of "Forse" has an almost improvised feel, the instrumental "Porno Musik" sounds like an episode of pure primordial punk-funk, and "Numero" is a bold experiment in graceless pop.

So, with careful analysis one can go beyond the most obvious references, recognizing in the band a keen awareness of the European alternative music landscape. This is music indebted to the past, yet steered by an awareness of its own means in the present. Respect for its models takes concrete shape above all in the tribute to guiding light David Bowie, with the cover of "Always Crashing In The Same Car." Even more significant in this regard, though, is the presence of Franco Battiato, an admirer of the band, who lends his voice to the finale of "Soprappensiero" and to "Punto di non arrivo." After the album's release, the "Digital Low Tour" kicks off, only to be aborted right after the first run of dates. The band goes on to collaborate with Alice (on "Chanson Egocentrique" for the album "Personal Juke Box"), and with Subsonica on the "Zero Volume" project (which leads to a video for the deaf for the song "Discolabirinto").

2001 is the year of their arrival at Sanremo in the Big Artists category with "L'assenzio." Co-written with Luca Urbani of Soerba (whose debut album, "Playlists," Morgan produced), the song clashes violently with the festival's sober atmosphere. The result of this mismatch is a last-place finish. Next comes the release of the compilation Pop Tools, gathering the songs with the greatest media impact, along with two previously unreleased tracks, "L'assenzio" and the splendid "Comequando." The video for "L'assenzio," directed by Morgan's then-girlfriend Asia Argento, won the award for best video clip at the Independent Labels Festival in Faenza.

From 2001 onward a period of "freeze" begins for the band, interrupted only exceptionally to open David Bowie's concert on July 15, 2002, at the Summer Festival in Lucca. From then on, each member devotes their energy to personal projects, time and again staving off the band's breakup. Aside from an appearance on New Year's Eve 2004, the years go by and Bluvertigo show no signs of life, fueling an agonizing wait among fans.

In 2008 the group reunites for a concert as part of the TV program "Storytellers." The material is presented anew in a thoroughly enjoyable electro-acoustic guise, with a strong Japan aftertaste and considerable space given to Andy's sax parts, decidedly more melodic and assured than those heard on the albums. The most radically transformed song is certainly "La crisi," which proves it can stand on its own as a simple acoustic-guitar ballad. What really shouldn't be missed, though, is the video, in which the host's attempts to reconstruct the band's history founder under the barrage of a rather over-the-top and quite comical Morgan.

Meanwhile, the eccentric frontman Marco Castoldi, during Bluvertigo's dormant period, devotes himself to his solo project. Canzoni dell’appartamento is Morgan's debut, but it's also a rather peculiar project. The shift toward singer-songwriter territory is clear-cut, the desire for intimacy perhaps predictable, but the solution the singer chooses to meet these premises is entirely in keeping with the Bluvertigo style.

Carrying forward the concept of the "self-cover," Morgan presents a series of songs steeped in elegantly retro arrangements and atmospheres, pretending to arrive straight from the Italian 1950s and '60s, presenting themselves as classics lost in the folds of memory.

In reality, though, these are deeply modern pieces, simply detached from any comparison with what was happening in 2003's music, in an attempt to recover the authentic classicism of Italian musical craftsmanship. At certain moments the sense of witnessing a "return to order," compared to Bluvertigo's sonic excess, is quite strong, but this is a sincere cleansing bath, and an equally honest acknowledgment, on the part of an Italian singer, that one cannot ignore the musical tradition of one's own country while remaining forever anchored to foreign reference points.

It's also, of course, a declaration of maturity with respect to the naive youthful fascination with all things foreign. The first and most successful example of this search for modern classics is "Altrove," a rock ballad that seems to come from the 1950s and yet is clearly the manifesto of a new chapter for Morgan, capable of letting his crooning soar on the wings of a dreamy string arrangement, making clear that from now on melody will be experienced only in its most crystalline purity, free from any embarrassment or debt owed to belonging to the rock scene. "Svincolarsi dalle convinzioni, dalle pose e dalle posizioni/ lascio che le cose mi portino altrove." The result is a song that seems to have always existed, as melodically immediate as it is theatrical in declaiming its protagonist's break for freedom, paradoxically never closer to David Bowie and at the same time never more Italian. This yearning for cleanliness and for music lived in its purest sonic essence is also found in the most properly rock track, the playful glam of "The Baby," which tells of the baby girl he had with his partner with the same unconventional grace as that little Bowie-esque gem "Kooks."

The album's other manifesto is "Aria", where the accompaniment, initially made up of a soft guitar and piano, gradually opens up to the aching breath of strings. The singer delivers one of his most convincing vocal performances, in an atmosphere of dreamy romanticism that sets the tone for the whole album, clearly centred on the feelings inspired by a love affair.

Warmth, clean sound, feelings conveyed with crystalline naturalness: this is also the formula presented by "Non arrossire", with lyrics by Giorgio Gaber.

One point of reference for an operation like this might be Battiato, who in "Fleurs" brings 1960s singer-songwriter music (in his case not just Italian but French too) back to life in the guise of nostalgic, classicizing romanze. Morgan, however, doesn't want to revive the songs of the past, but their sound, and he wants to create new songs as if they had been written back then. It is therefore the exact opposite of an updating: a projecting backwards in order to emerge with something completely different.

Once again one might wonder whether this is simply a refined exercise in style, but if the yearning for romanticism and tenderness weren't genuine, the singer wouldn't be able to establish the feeling he shows within these atmospheres. His true passion, though, lies in the technical craft, in the process of building music by getting inside the instruments handled by the authors of pop's golden age. The main raison d'être of many tracks lies in the great game of arrangements that Morgan manages to deploy, delighting in dusting off various keyboard instruments typically associated with the Sixties and Seventies (the Hammond organ, the Wurlitzer, the Mellotron), along with the luxury of string and brass accompaniments. In a song like "Crash" it's the orchestral interventions that bring the track to life, letting it open into a broad melodic sweep. This is the territory Morgan means to explore, and he does so with great taste and a sense of proportion, never falling into kitsch or dustiness. This is a danger that, while listening, as one is increasingly caught in the hypnotic coils of the various tracks, isn't even noticed. Remarkable, then, are the lush arrangement of synthetic strings and the aching piano that accompany "Me" all the way to an almost solemn coda, the playful music-box chime of violins and acoustic guitars that turn the bucolic "If" by Pink Floyd into the pop single it never was, and the suspended mood of "Italian Violence", played out between stillness punctuated by piano and sudden gusts of strings.

"Heaven In My Cocktail" is instead an acid dance track where the vintage sounds of the accordion (especially on the chorus) combine with a heavily distorted bass and a more aggressive attitude than it might seem. "La ragione delle piogge" is instead an intimate, purely singer-songwriter track, accompanied by a genuine orchestra, as well as the usual complement of organ and Mellotron, setting just the right dreamy, psychedelic tone. "Canzone per Natale", finally, is a sweet piano ballad that seems to seal the spell of an album that truly exists in a zone devoid of reference points, and only by virtue of the passion of a great cataloguer of music from the past.

No one is surprised that, given the approach described above, Morgan should naturally gravitate towards the art of the cover, but the choice to remake in full Non al denaro, non all'amore né al cielo by Fabrizio De André, from 1971 and inspired by Edgar Lee Masters's "Spoon River Anthology", is certainly a truly original one. The work was "commissioned" and backed by Dori Ghezzi, De André's partner, with the aim of getting younger generations to rediscover one of the Genoese singer-songwriter's most accomplished achievements, for which he had collaborated with Nicola Piovani on the music. The version by Morgan and his band, which already shows the grafting-in of various elements later found on Da A ad A, is fairly faithful and respectful, both in the interpretation and in the arrangements, which add shades now classicizing, now electronic, in keeping with the eclecticism shown on the first album.

The album's high point is the full-bodied reworking of "Un ottico", which already had an arrangement that was "rock" in its own right, letting him unite his two loves: Italian song and Sixties English psychedelia. Throughout the record the pathos is rendered in a rather subtle way, and it's not hard to imagine Morgan identifying, as De André did before him, with the lines of "Suonatore Jones": “E poi se la gente sa, e la gente lo sa che sai suonare/ suonare ti tocca per tutta la vita/ e ti piace lasciarti ascoltare”.

His second solo album, titled Da A ad A, is in every respect an intensification of the first. From the very start of "Amore assurdo" it's clear that the prosaic quality of the lyrics — a weapon Morgan has used effectively against the false "poetry" of so many singer-songwriters ever since his Bluvertigo days — has turned into sprawling verbal excess. Likewise, the arrangements, which revive classicizing sonorities, vintage instruments, orchestra (but also the addition of Megahertz's electronics), haven't lost their grace in the way they accumulate, and now present a veritable "wall of sound" where every space to breathe (remember "Aria"?) has been filled in.

It would be naive to put these elements down to a simple mistake on Morgan's part, just as it's ridiculous to think he didn't notice that a track like "Storia d'amore e di vanità" is rather heavy-handed. He did it on purpose, because excess and heaviness are no longer off-limits possibilities for him. In the same way, the melodramatic emphasis of certain performances tends to push the feeling of lost love to such an extreme that it is, in a sense, neutralized. In this case it's clear that the record works more as therapy for its maker (fresh from the break-up with his partner, whose name can be identified with one of the A's in the title, while the other is the initial of his daughter's name) than for the listener.

One cannot fail to notice, however, that this album expresses, with more courage (and less sense of proportion) than its predecessor, an allegiance to a strand that stands at the complete opposite end from the minimalism along whose lines most of the Italian pop-rock landscape moves, dedicated instead to an absolute, complex musicality, to the fullness of the arrangements. In short, Morgan has forgotten post-punk and gone back to Sixties pop art, to those sonic garbs rich in strings where one encounters typically Italian classicizing tendencies alongside certain Baroque eccentricities of the Anglo-Saxon scene.

Just as in Canzoni dell'appartamento, the sensibility is nonetheless modern — indeed, here the emotional crisis pushes the tones to an extreme, as can be heard in the more aggressive tracks, like "La cosa", which opens with distorted guitars before settling into the almost demented music-box chime of its chorus. The playfulness of "The baby" turns instead, in tracks like "Anomali familiari" and "U blue", into a rather disturbing psychedelic strangeness, to the point that the electronic gloom of "Liebestod" ("harmonically born of the first and last chords of Richard Wagner's opera 'Tristan und Isolde'") seems, by comparison, a reassuring environment.

Overall the impression is that not many tracks manage to reach the heights they're aiming for, that the amalgam of countless parts and musical ideas doesn't always manage to turn into an organic, fully realized effect, beyond the sense of surprise and wonder stirred by the individual flourishes. Among these tracks worth noting is "Da A ad A", with its alternation of shadowy verses punctuated by bass and festive choruses with brass flourishes, in which even Morgan the singer's "wordy" streak manages to work. Fairly straightforward too are the pop-rock of the single "Tra 5 min." and the noir ballad "Demoni nella notte", but the feeling is that the truth about this record is best expressed by the closing "Contro me stesso": “Non ho nulla da preservare o centellinare… o ambizioni di perfezione/ io non simulo il mio progresso/ perché son contro me stesso”.

Overall, this is a consciously imperfect record, one that chooses the path of excess and error to arrive at a kind of dazed truth and, in its own way, coherence. The result is decidedly more rock and more physical, in terms of the sheer density of the sounds too, compared with the abstractness of its predecessor, and the album certainly stands as a genuine mystery object, a freak in a musical landscape that, for a change, is heading in an entirely different direction. Even those who don't appreciate the album should admit that more eccentric trajectories like this one are needed, especially in a musical context where the big names always play it safe. The record, in fact, tackles one of Song's most overused topoi, romantic catastrophe, without ever falling into the usual Italian pathos, but instead moving along the thin line of a derailed self-irony.

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