Iosonouncane - Sounds and Words Beyond the Frost

One of the most glaring mistakes made by those who have written about Italian music in the 2010s has been lumping the Iosonouncane project into the great cauldron of indie music, attempting unlikely connections with various artists deemed similar, without fully grasping its absolute originality. In truth, placing Jacopo Incani within any Italian scene, if only for geographical or temporal reasons, seems at best contrived, since the Sardinian artist — for the meticulousness of his production, the care in his choice of lyrics, the strangeness of his sounds and vocals, and his political/social/cultural vision of Italian society — can genuinely be considered a stateless alien in his own homeland.

The music of the Iosonouncane project feels like a solitary exorcism dancing over Italian horrors, often drawing on news stories to sing about the contradictions of a society with no ideals beyond the hedonism already denounced decades earlier by Pasolini, at the mercy of populism, vulgar and proud of its own ignorance, a predestined victim of whichever demagogue comes along, guided by nothing but its own survival instinct. The solitary aspect seems crucial; Incani often seems to seek isolation, almost an attempt to please not too many people, to be free to say everything he thinks without having any congregation to defend. A political choice, but the politics of a party of which he is the only member. More than with music, a connection that struck me as obvious right away is the one with great Italian cinema of social critique – from the irredeemable monsters of Ettore Scola's "Brutti, sporchi e cattivi", to the betrayed left of Marco Bellocchio's "La Cina è vicina", from the misfortunes of the poor emigrant in Franco Brusati's "Pane e cioccolata" to Dino Risi's famous anthology film "I mostri" – and who knows, perhaps even with the theatre of Antonio Rezza. It's interesting to note how, at least in his debut, Incani managed to convey sensations similar to those a film can transmit. The Italy of new monsters, of a formless mass of Romero-esque zombies invading shopping malls, of egotists ready to turn on the weakest without mercy, hailing rich, successful men as an unattainable role model.

Incani was born in 1983 in Buggerru, a small Sardinian town with a significant history of labour struggle that reached its tragic climax on 4 September 1904 with the Buggerru massacre, where three miners were killed during a strike against inhumane working conditions, violently suppressed by the army called in to aid the mine's French owners. I like to think, and it seems likely, that this left its mark on his formation and mindset.

He grew up listening to the most celebrated Italian singer-songwriters, from Fabrizio De André to Lucio Battisti, from Lucio Dalla to Francesco De Gregori all the way to Franco Battiato, before becoming an omnivorous listener who ranges from psychedelia and psychedelic folk all the way to electronic music, the oddities of the Residents, the dissonances of Can, the king of freaks Frank Zappa, dubstep and much more. The result of this compulsive listening is a bizarre, dissonant mix in which all these influences are present yet at the same time concealed within entirely new sonorities.

His career begins with Adharma, a band active between 2000 and 2008 with whom he released an EP, Risvegli (2005), and an LP released four years after the band split, Mano ai pulsanti (2012). This Sardinian trio based in Bologna – made up of Jacopo Incani (voice, guitar) alongside Simone Ena (drums) and Riccardo Aresti (bass) – clearly shows the influence of Verdena's alternative rock, with a powerful, distorted bass (the title track, "L'idiota") and guitar stitching up the spaces in between. Alt-rock, noise-rock, maybe even post-punk, for a work of barely twenty-six minutes that already shows enormous potential and a certain otherness compared to contemporary bands.

In 2007 they recorded Mano ai pulsanti, but the band broke up and the LP wasn't released until 2012. Had it come out in 2007, it would have partly foreshadowed the debut of Incani's solo project, "La macarena su Roma". Mano ai pulsanti is an alternative-rock concept album about the effects of television on the population, seen for what it is: an instrument that narcotizes consciences, creates false needs and false fears, and is capable of distorting our perception of reality, making us able to hate those weaker than us while loving the well-paid, hyper-integrated agents of the system. Some sonorities lean closer to progressive rock than the work from two years earlier, particularly in the keyboards, piano and synths of "La gabbia nel mare", a kaleidoscope of rhythms and genres split into three parts. As they themselves put it, the record is "an act of resistance that can only take place from within power, within the system, which one wants, as far as possible, to oppose. For this reason we chose to use the same language, the same terms, the same imagery, the same media slogans, in order to overturn their meaning as violently and critically as possible".

Incani's solo career begins in 2008 with the Iosonouncane project. In the meantime he works at a call centre, a job that lets him see up close the sorry conditions of a generation full of untapped potential, wasted on pointless and humiliating work. He decides to quit in order to pursue his true ambitions, debuting with La Macarena su Roma (2010), a formidable, raw, realistic and prescient snapshot of contemporary Italy, an experiment halfway between music, cinema and theatre. The new millennium's march on Rome won't be carried out by grim black-clad thugs, but by dancing, smiling masses of men raised on private TV, steeped in advertising slogans and summer hit singles, browbeaten by TV loudmouths and gossip magazines. What emerges is an organized cauldron of pop pseudo-culture ("Pinne, fucili e occhiali", "Pan di stelle molto buoni", the shouting of Sgarbi and other talk-show monsters), brainless stadium chants, TV show jingles, the horrors of functional illiteracy ("Se saprei come fare"), elections experienced as a settling of scores, a desire for revenge with no shame at all over racist thoughts ("Bevi negro!"), all of it drawing on news stories that become profound metaphors for a reality perceived in a distorted way.

The figure who resists this wave of endless local festivals, beach aperitivi, group dances, tournaments and treasure hunts that repeat themselves identically every year ("Il corpo del reato") becomes essential, yet utterly powerless in the face of the endless advance of this hideous triumphal march. Twelve tracks that form one long concept album, between music and theatre, describing the worst of Italy through entirely alternative narrative techniques. A way of exorcizing reality, with hysterical, hyper-rapid vocals, with words chasing each other at speed, like an accelerated singer-songwriter tradition set to compulsive rhythms.

"Summer on a spiaggia affollata" (a nod to Battiato) opens with the news story of an immigrant who drowned on a beach, clearly rendering Italy's anthropological mutation – already denounced by Pasolini – now fully realized thanks to a new generation of haters, keyboard-warrior heroes raised on the most regressive talk shows. A boat of immigrants is adrift off a beach packed with Italians on holiday; everyone is disgusted and thinks first and foremost of getting themselves filmed by the TV crew that's just arrived so they can wave to their friends, right down to the shouts wishing drowning deaths on the Black children. A dystopian delirium that would have delighted Frank Zappa and the real Captain, Don Vliet. Hatred is always directed at the different and the weakest ("Il boogie dei piedi"), at anyone who doesn't recognize themselves in this horde. The non-conformist can only be a lonely outcast, accused by the integrated of being nothing but "hands torn from the lottery, hands torn from vote-buying". In "Il corpo del reato" an accident on a country road, in which one of the two protagonists dies, becomes a deeply sad moment of reflection on the uselessness of the thousand obligations society confronts us with every day, arriving at the realization that "people like you were only alive once they were dead", managing to see the truth (and so, philosophically, to be alive) only when it's too late.

An alien amid a multitude of Macarena dancers, Incani can't find kindred spirits even where, in theory, they should exist, namely in left-wing parties ("I superstiti"). In this little gem of layered vocals, even a resurrected Antonio Gramsci is a depressed call-centre worker looking for a new job, a metaphor for how much humanity is wasted on pointless, underpaid jobs or on equally pointless CV submissions. An unbearable stench (both from the well-integrated zombie-men and the unwitting submissive ones) envelops the survivors, now reduced to meeting up only at tedious aperitivi, an utterly anonymous form of togetherness. It's the sixth estate, emerging after the fourth estate of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and the fifth estate of the stateless-at-home. "Il sesto stato" is the most overtly psychedelic track, somewhere between Syd Barrett and the lysergic pop of the Byrds or the Beatles, an anthem for the generation of call-centre workers, the unemployed, young people with no rights and above all no future.

But the invasion is unstoppable, and it reaches its peak in the title track, nine minutes with percussion underpinning the shouts of the new masters, the fake all-weather hucksters, the demagogic loudmouths chiefly responsible for the devolution and narcosis of thought. The Macarena dancers invade every corner of Rome, tolerating no difference whatsoever. Even though Incani shouts "I'm perfectly fine on my own, I've never hurt a fly, my neighbours barely know I exist", this isn't tolerated. Even though crushed by a job that leaves him dragging himself home exhausted, dreaming of collapsing onto the sofa to watch TV in his tiny studio flat, wondering who'll win Paolo Bonolis's trash game shows, he still displays a minimal degree of difference. What's striking is the protagonist's stream of thought as he slumps exhausted on the sofa watching TV, a stream with nothing autonomous or personal about it, entirely at the mercy of the broadcast images and words. Every sentence on TV generates a different opinion, totally disconnected from the one before, a kind of zapping of thoughts that produces passive pseudo-opinions (that is, not born of free, autonomous thought) and regressive ones, reducing the viewer to little more than a trained parrot.

The Macarena reaches right up to the front door, unstoppable. "Everyone sings, everyone dances, everyone laughs, the psychologist, the showgirls, the weatherman, the journalists, the footballers, the city councillor, passing the microphone from hand to hand" – these zombies demand absolute conformity. Should one surrender, or resist in one's own solitude? Incani recalls Gaber's words, "Freedom is participation". But the participation granted by TV is that of the phone-in vote, which offers the false, consoling perception that "today, I decide". Hence the little jingle from the show "La Corrida", which makes clear just how much of a farce, a mockery, that granted participation really is.

The closing track, "Giugno", with its decadent dream-pop atmospheres, suggests an Incani grown old and toothless, now fully assimilated, sadly recalling those days and finally deciding to quit his pointless job.

A tough, courageous album, a unique case in Italian discography. About 250 concerts followed over two years, along with the release of the single "Le sirene di luglio" (2012), a deranged, deconstructed folk piece, and then another three years of work went into recording DIE (2015). Playing on the word's double meaning in Italian – readable as both "day" and "die" – Incani creates his most musically mature work, evolving towards entirely different atmospheres. On the surface it's a less political record, but it's only less blatant about it. If there is politics here, it should be understood as the creation of a new language and a new sound that, in hindsight, can be read as an act of distinctiveness against the contemporary moment, and therefore, by extension, a political act.

The obsessive rhythms and layered electronics of "Tanca" are its masterpiece, a vertigo of modernity paired with tribalism, so dense with sound that it becomes chilling. "Tanca" radically flips the perspective of La macarena su Roma, attempting to read reality not from the point of view of the Italian woman lying in the sun but from that of the immigrant arriving exhausted on the shore. The cover art already makes this explicit. A golden beach and a blue sky; in the background, far off, perhaps a woman lying down. Looming above, though, is the word DIE, readable both as death and as a day spent at the seaside, creating a strong ambiguity between image and text. The lyrics can be read as the vision of an immigrant arriving, now close to death ("the scythe comes, dragging itself through the salt") on a beach full of families on holiday, hoping to be saved, but finding only new kinds of suffering ("hunger has found hunger"). It's certainly one of the high points of Italian discography of recent years, both in terms of truly meticulous production and sonic innovation. The references to the national singer-songwriter tradition are more overt this time, but on tracks like "Buio" – an experiment between slow, lysergic new age and ambient that intertwine and constantly shift – and "Carne", the distance from that songwriting tradition is vast. On "Stormi" and "Paesaggio", by contrast, the connection to Battisti is more evident. "Mandria" closes the circle, a partial reprise of "Tanca", a repetitive, hypnotic electronic dance.

By now Incani is a leading figure of the Italian underground, respected by both audiences and critics alike. In 2016 he collaborated with Verdena, one of his favourite Italian bands, on Split Ep. Two of Incani's tracks played by the band, and vice versa. Verdena overturn the masterpiece "Tanca" with the hardness of their guitars, giving the track new life, with an almost progressive finale. "Carne" becomes almost like a track written by the early-days Verdena, shouted and furious. Incani does the exact opposite with two tracks taken from "Endkadenz", adding an electronic matrix where guitar had previously been more prominent. This fascinating experiment makes clear just how much closer the bond between the two projects actually is than it might have seemed on first listen.

2018 is the year Incani's collaboration with Paolo Angeli deepens, with a duo tour that took them across Italy from north to south.

In 2021 he releases IRA, delayed by a year because of the Covid pandemic. Seventeen long tracks, almost always pushing close to the ten-minute mark, with a voice that vanishes to become just another instrument among instruments. From the word-bombardment of the debut, through the search for poetic lyrics on DIE, to today's pseudo-aphasia, the shift is total. The language becomes incomprehensible, turning into a chimerical blend of Spanish, French, English, Arabic and who knows what else, as if to create a non-language. What emerges clearly is a distrust of the very meaning of words, of the possibility that they can truly communicate anything in today's society.

Incani has by now abandoned any tie to the singer-songwriter tradition, still present throughout various tracks on DIE, to finally bring to completion the intuitions first glimpsed in a track like "Tanca". An overwhelming quantity of sonic stimuli that feel like an instruction manual for the musicians of the future, with a voice that constantly shifts register while keeping - as its only common denominator - its own incomprehensibility.

It's hard to single out one track over another, such is the sheer amount of material packed into this encyclopedic LP. Electronics and percussion wrap around an impressive array of references, so wide-ranging that they can only really be grasped after repeated listens. From the vocals of "Petrole", which recall Robert Wyatt, to the towering electronic cathedrals somewhere between Swans and Ben Frost (take, for instance, the extraordinary hyper-chaotic finale of "Hajar"), all the way to nods to the most experimental Radiohead ("Piel"). IRA, in short, could well be for Italy what "Kid A" or "Amnesiac" were for the British scene. The sighed vocal of "Ashes" recalls the strange voice of the masterpiece "Not Available" by Residents, as does the synth sound that then dissolves into a colossal hippie-commune dance. Percussion plays a crucial role across several tracks, and among them "Hajar" stands out without question: epileptic tribalism slashed open by swipes of synth. Middle Eastern influences surface repeatedly, for instance in the voice and rhythms of "Foule", a marriage of desert sounds and electronics. Raw and obsessive at times, as in the infernal electronic beats of "Prison", out of which unexpectedly emerges the album's most melodic moment, almost an anthem of freedom. Guitar moments are not absent either, for example in "Sangre", perhaps born out of listening to Jon Hassell.

What stands out and strikes the listener is the meticulousness evident in every single sound, which seems layered, reshaped and finally chosen only after obsessive research. Incani thus seems to demolish any notion of improvisation. Moreover, IRA is undoubtedly a political album in the highest sense of the term. It is political in that it positions itself as total otherness to the present-day world, whether in terms of its length, its structure, or its tearing down of every linguistic border in an age of the one-way bombardment of thousands of meaningless words (TV, social media). In a world where everything is opinion and truth has long been buried, Incani refuses to join that chorus, pointing instead toward a new path that, if followed, could sow the seeds for a new musical season.

In 2023 he releases the recordings of the 2018 live show with Paolo Angeli. Jalitah (the name of a small archipelago between Sardinia and Tunisia) collects the duo's 2018 live performances in a perfect blend of the two solo experiences.

From this brotherhood and this mutual respect could only come a perfect balance, where improvisation can suddenly turn into song, then into traditional Sardinian music, before slowly drifting toward pure avant-garde. It's a miraculous equilibrium that breathes through these fifty-two minutes of recording, from new versions of Incani's older staples ("Summer on a spiaggia affollata", "Carne") to the introduction of the opening track "Zeidae", a fantastic fusion of avant-garde rock with hints of kraut and the scents of Sardinian soil.

If there is a close bond with Western rock, it's perhaps with the most experimental strand of the 1970s, the German "kraut" scene, which seems to live again in something like "Sela" or "Banco delle sentinelle", which can recall the brief experiments of the legendary third album by Faust. A courageous live album, and a release that fills a gap: the memory of one of the most important Italian collaborations and live experiences of the last fifteen years.

Qui noi cadiamo verso il fondo gelido documents two years of concerts, from 2021 to 2022, tracing the evolution of IRA and moving as far as possible from the live-music industry. After placing himself within the world (first as an Italian man, then as an immigrant), Incani shifts his vantage point upward, to where one is as alone as possible. Incani's live shows are therefore unpredictable, alien to that all-too-common and frankly unartistic idea of mass karaoke that mainstream live music seems to have become today. Incani's made-up language prevents the audience from singing along in any form, forcing absolute attention toward the music, which in turn is never quite what you'd expect.

His most celebrated tracks are certainly there, like "Ashes", "Tanca", "Prison" or "Hajar", but fundamentally Iosonouncane's live shows aim for unpredictability and disorientation, which is why the most interesting tracks are the ones absent from the official discography (a full eleven out of eighteen) and seemingly improvised, like "Trombe", with its blaring horns over the usual synth beds, or "Bestas", with its repetitive percussion and synthetic stabs.

Incani's band chases the trip, the inner journey toward the possibility of being elsewhere, somewhere apart from one's own body. There are also possible references at play, perhaps Klaus Schulze in "Voci", for instance, but what strikes you most, ultimately, is the constant sense of sonic matter still in the making, which always leaves a different impression with each listen; in the end, Incani's live shows are one long fall from above into the chill of awareness. And that's no small thing.

Iosonouncane, Sardinian like Berlinguer, and certainly close to him both personally and culturally, could only be the musician best suited to score La grande ambizione (2024), a soundtrack that is part of a new series of releases called "Il suono attraversato", soon to come out, which will collect Incani's music for film and theatre. The first entry in this series will be precisely "La grande ambizione", to be followed in 2025 by the soundtrack for the documentary "Ukrainian Lyric" by journalist Francesca Mannocchi.

Incani puts himself at the service of Andrea Segre's film, trying to carry forward the path already mapped out in his own discography. The sounds of IRA are indeed still present here, even if put to work within the audio-visual format, with the constraints and rules that it imposes. Still, you can feel the dedication and human closeness Incani must have felt while writing these compositions, almost as if he were scoring a film dedicated to a brother, rather than to a political figure who died when he was barely one year old.

The central theme has a way of evoking the folk song ("1973", the year of the American-backed coup in Chile that brought Pinochet to power at Allende's expense), lending a certain solemnity as if the music were dedicated to a man of the people while at the same time charged with enough symbolism to transfigure him into a hero. Popular music and 20th-century classical music thus seem to overlap, as they so often have. The insights of IRA remain essential here too, from the anguished memories of Berlinguer's mother, who died when he was still a child ("Madre"), to the memories of the neo-fascist massacre in Piazza della Loggia, where synths layer over the main theme.

The journeys to the seemingly friendly countries of the Warsaw Pact are underscored by particularly claustrophobic music, as in the Bulgarian assassination attempt ("Non è stato un attentato") or the trip to the USSR ("URSS"), in the dialogue with Brezhnev or in the nighttime scenes of Moscow ("Mosca di notte"). The central theme returns in "Il discorso al Cremlino", the historic speech in which Berlinguer had the courage to assert, right there at the Kremlin, the deep divide between Italian democratic communism and Russian totalitarian communism. It's curious that this same sense of oppression resurfaces only in the scene featuring President Andreotti ("Giulio il collezionista"), the standard-bearer of Moscow's rivals.

Andrea Segre clearly underscores the historical turning points that marked Berlinguer's life. From the 34% won in the 1976 general election, which ushered in the two-year period of the "historic compromise" and raised hopes of collaboration between Moro and Berlinguer - that is, between the DC and the PCI. Those hopes, however, were crushed by the kidnapping of Aldo Moro ("Il rapimento di Moro"), scored with music that echoes Kremlin-like atmospheres before closing with a synth finale in IRA style.

"Il funerale di Enrico" closes the album: sung by Daniela Pes, who reprises the central theme, the track serves as the soundtrack to Berlinguer's funeral and becomes a tragic funeral lament that, thanks to extraordinary archive footage, conveys the sense of the anthropological shift Italy underwent in just forty years - where it's not only Berlinguer's personal story that seems to have come to an end, but the very soul of an entire nation.

The second release in the "Il suono attraversato" project, which gathers Iosonouncane's music for film and theatre, is the score for the documentary Ukrainian Lyric by journalist Francesca Mannocchi, released after the soundtrack for Berlinguer – The Great Ambition. The pairing of two figures so significant in their respective fields could hardly fail to produce meaningful results, and the hopes placed in it are by no means betrayed. Francesca Mannocchi's choice is to step entirely aside from the tragic events captured in the documentary: as in a novel by Émile Zola, where the story seems to write itself, here the documentary seems to film itself, with no real filter imposed by the director.

There is no judgment, no commentary, no opinion: everything is centred on the stark reality of bare facts, highlighting the tragedy of a people deceived, wounded and ultimately betrayed, struggling to survive at any cost. The director's gaze observes without judging the apocalypse unfolding before it, focusing on the material and moral devastation of every war, never specifying the place or time of the events filmed - as if the conflict were an eternal sentence, placeless and timeless, tormenting humankind since its very birth.

Into these scenes of ruin and destruction, Incani steps in with mastery, working in particular on synth timbres and pulling off the feat of heightening the sense of tragedy that pervades the documentary. The result is a soundtrack that adds power to the already extreme images of "Ukrainian Lyric", without relying on a recurring melody (unlike Berlinguer – The Great Ambition), but keeping timbral exploration and synth pulsations as a common thread. Incani imagines the sound of war in its many facets: from destroyed homes to corpses that will never receive a burial, from the snow and cold tormenting survivors to griefs that will never find consolation. Striking, in the choice of titles, is the fact that the word "ancora" ("still"/"again") recurs no fewer than three times ("Ancora guerra", "Ancora vivi", "Ancora neve"), signalling an endless suffering - a sentence and a curse striking millions of people, in every place and every era.

The music clearly owes a debt to Ira, the watershed album in Incani's career that laid the groundwork for the entire "Il suono attraversato" project. Synths, piano, sampling, a touch of percussion and vocals (on just two tracks) are the basic materials with which Incani builds his personal vision of the tragedy of war. The sound of "Sirene", worthy of the finest dark ambient, is the most distressing: an obsessively repeating loop that seems to foreshadow further misfortune to come. The jagged melodies of "Ancora guerra", the synth-and-piano rhythms of "Fuggire" (with an unrecognisable voice), the almost symphonic touches of "Macerie" are genuinely elevated moments that transform the meaning of the images, adding emotion where it might seem impossible to do so. The pulsation of "Scavare, riempire, lasciare" can almost onomatopoeically evoke the act of digging, reinforcing the survivors' pain.

Ukrainian Lyric closes with images of the before: images of a country at peace, a church, country houses and finally a field of sunflowers. Incani's music ("Girasoli") grows more ethereal, a melody emerging from the synths conveying a sense of nostalgia for what might still have been, and was instead lost.

The third release in the "Il suono attraversato" project, the soundtrack for the film by Italian-Bosnian director Ado Hasanovic, I diari di mio padre (2025), continues Iosonouncane's mission of scoring a series of films and documentaries that trace Italian and European history through its most tragic moments. From the recent war in Ukraine to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the '90s, Incani keeps to his course through European tragedy, from Berlinguer's shattered dreams to the resurgent nationalisms that unleash new wars decade after decade.

Ado Hasanovic's film, unfortunately given little distribution, draws on old, low-quality archive footage, recorded on the director's father's old VHS tapes, bearing witness to the events of those ten years of deprivation, terror and the loss of all sense of humanity. What Hasanovic recounts is not only the hardships endured by his own family, but the collective losses of peoples who had managed to live together in peace for decades, when suddenly the virus of nationalism took hold of them, turning into an enemy someone who, just days before, had been a co-worker or a neighbour.

Iosonouncane's music retains that synth sound which, by now, is recognisable within seconds, heightening, as far as possible, the film's rawest scenes ("Deportazione", "Funerali"). There is a clear thread linking the three soundtracks released so far - one we will likely find again in those to come: a sonic language that evolves from record to record, while at the same time referencing itself, building a coherent poetics in constant transformation.

Notable is Incani's choice to isolate brief passages from Mozart's "Requiem", manipulating and transforming them into a requiem for the Bosnian victims. Other solutions appear in the glitches of "DNA", in the sound of the diatonic accordion in "Srebrenica", in the tolling bells of "Funerali" - with a melody that recalls "Berlinguer" - and "Campane". All of these are episodes that immerse us in the sorrow of a world in ruins, where the passing of the torch from father to son is the only light left to hold on to.

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