Offlaga Disco Pax - Technical rehearsals for cultural resistance

Offlaga Disco Pax. Thoroughly Italian, despite the abstruse name. From Emilia, to be precise.

Enrico Fontanelli (moog, Casiotone, bass, backing tracks), Daniele Carretti (guitar, bass) and Max Collini (vocals, lyrics).

Winners of Rockontest 2004, before this album even came out they had already built an "underground" reputation thanks to a string of performances across Italy, which meant this first official release, for Santeria, didn't go unnoticed.

Socialismo Tascabile is a strange album, genuinely hard to talk about, mainly because rather than putting forward a single reading, it leaves plenty of room for discussion, for the laborious attempt to work out what lies behind a project like this and which ideas it's actually trying to put across.

Listening to the record, you're left stunned and a little disoriented by its originality and by the sheer number of influences that flow into it.

The spoken-word, rather than sung, lyrics immediately bring to mind Massimo Volume, the subject matter echoes that of CCCP, the musical and electronic minimalism seems to borrow something from Kraftwerk, Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire, right through to Xiu Xiu and Radio Dept.

And it would be reductive not to note the literary influence of two wildly different writers, Pier Vittorio Tondelli (for the depiction of the Emilia-Romagna setting of the early Eighties) and Aldo Nove (for writing unafraid to edge toward the spoken word, and for its mixing of high and low registers).

Offlaga Disco Pax tell the story of a world that no longer exists, that of the communism dreamed of in the Seventies and Eighties, in a small town in Emilia like Cavriago.

But this is not mere declamation or nostalgic reminiscence: it's through seemingly unrelated themes, like school conduct (“Kappler”), first love (“Khmer rossa”) or, surprisingly, a history of chewing gum (“Cinnamon”), that a cross-section of a historical moment, a region and a neighborhood “where the Communist Party took 74%” comes into focus. Amid the past, the present peeks through too, in ironic little vignettes about hating a shop clerk (“Tono metallico standard”) or the end of a love affair, symbolized by a sponge flip-flop (“De Fonseca”).

Memories, feelings, moods, ideas: everything told through the deeply personal gaze of someone who was young back then and full of good intentions, raised in a humus where you couldn't help but root for the Revolution, the Sandinistas, Robespierre, Berlinguer, but at the same time played Space Invaders, picked up Tele Capodistria on TV and watched Anna Oxa at Sanremo.

In an almost dance-like track, fittingly titled “Robespierre”, memories are listed one after another, with no logical connection, no precise selection: simply everything that's left of an era.

And then, the cold shower: “Tatranky”. Over eight minutes of declamation and oppression recalling the glorious “Emilia Paranoica” by Cccp.

But from Emilia we move to present-day Prague, stripped of every Soviet symbol, swallowed up by capitalism, where the clubs play Al Bano and Romina's “Felicità” and even the wafers are made by a multinational.

It's perhaps in that line — “Ci hanno davvero preso tutto” — with which the track culminates, that the meaning of the whole album can be traced: in resignation, in accepting defeat, in no longer being able to change things, in having gotten everything wrong, in no longer having anything to believe in blindly.

This calls for a reflection: it's well known that political and protest song in Italy has been in decline for many years now. The only name that comes to mind is that of the Modena City Ramblers, a collective of long-hairs capable of rattling off clichés on the thousand overused, outdated themes of the left. If there's anyone who seems to have understood which direction political song needs to take in 2005, in an age of globalization and multinationals, it really does seem to be Offlaga Disco Pax: because protest is pointless, talking about Che Guevara and Chiapas again is pointless, and at the same time railing against McDonald's and multinationals is just as pointless.

Resignation, the acceptance of defeat, but at the same time the harsh and terrible realization of a society that perhaps doesn't sit entirely well with us: this is something that was missing, and now, thanks to Offlaga Disco Pax, it's here.

Add to all this music that's right up to date and wouldn't look out of place next to far more celebrated foreign artists, add a strong Emilian accent unafraid of mispronunciation, add a huge dose of irony that in places becomes truly irresistible, and you get a superb, important record that defies any classification.

Hard not to love it, or at least appreciate it, whatever you think, whatever your age.

Hated or loved without half measures, Offlaga couldn't care less about the expectations surrounding them, and for their second album they don't change their formula, returning with the usual spoken-word tales from reciter-singer Collini over soundscapes indebted as much to the electronics of Kraftwerk and Suicide as to the post-rock of their friends Giardini di Mirò.

In reality, though, everything staying the same is only true on the surface: between Bachelite (2008) and its successful predecessor there are perhaps slight but substantial differences, in the lyrics, which breathe a less political air, and in the accompanying music, which takes a noticeable step forward.

While it's true that the opening story of the unlikeable Carlotta in “Superchiome” and the tale of comrade Yashenko's epic sporting feat, with its moog flourishes, in “Ventrale”, might seem like copies of past tracks, already in the amusing “Dove ho messo la Golf?” — a story of cars, traffic wardens turned fairies, card-playing police officers and Brazilian presidential elections — with its excellent “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”-style synths and the interplay between guitar and piano, a greater musical sophistication can already be detected.

A sophistication that grows steadily throughout the album, from “Cioccolato I.A.C.P.”, whose post-rock is infiltrated by a cello, through “Fermo!” — the fight for the self-determination of the chamois on the Sibillini mountains — with another remarkable display of synth work, up to “Onomastica”, which pushes the storytelling into the background to focus on the music, where a pulsing bass, a sped-up drum beat, drifting electronics and, over everything, the improvised digressions of a sax played by Andy of Bluvertigo, all coexist.

The outburst of rage and indignation in the pre-finale of “Sensibile”, dealing with the Mambro-Fioravanti affair, and the moving memory of the father in “Venti minuti”, complete with an Erri De Luca-style emotional transference of a fellow soldier who sees in the son the figure of his deceased friend, infuse flashes of humanity previously unseen in the Emilian group's work.

Bachelite, in short, is the album of a band on the rise, not locked into a formula, but in search of further progress within its own style.

The tour supporting the album wrapped up in November 2009, after around a hundred concerts in total.

2010 opens with the recording of a new track, “Isla Dawson”, included on the compilation “Materiale resistente 2010”.

The second half of the year, meanwhile, was devoted to reworking some tracks from the first two albums: gone were the lush arrangements that once dressed Collini's fine lyrics, gone the shoegaze-like drifts and the pounding rhythms. Offlaga instead opted for sonic backdrops built entirely out of 1980s Casio keyboards, picked up for next to nothing at flea markets or from some junk dealer who popped up online at the last minute.

The result of this process came together on Prototype, a self-produced EP pressed in a limited edition (just five hundred copies) sold during the promotional tour (fittingly dubbed the "Prototype Tour") that ran until the end of the year.

The six songs chosen for the new treatment were "Robespierre", "Tono metallico standard", "Fermo!", "Lungimiranza", "Onomastica" and "Ventrale".

The live shows were a genuine extension of the EP, since the Casio treatment was also applied to "Superchiome", "Khmer rossa", "Dove ho messo la Golf?", "Tatranky", "De Fonseca" and "Piccola Pietroburgo", plus an unreleased track titled "Bassline", the story of a guy who believes himself to be the architect of Massive Attack's sound, with lyrics drawn from a story in the book "L'ultimo disco dei Mohicani" by Maurizio Blatto.

In the "Prototype" project, everything turns out to be extremely minimal: cheap, low-resolution electronics transformed into a sound source with unexpectedly rich expressive possibilities. Situations bordering on lo-fi that step outside the domestic sphere to become small-scale orchestrations backing Max Collini's hagiographic narratives.

Offlaga Disco Pax's third official release, Board game (2012), does nothing but consolidate and sharpen the band's style from Reggio Emilia. Stories of the suburban neighborhoods of what was not yet "Padania", steeped in youthful petit-bourgeois vitality and dissolved into synthetic beats somewhere between post-rock and Kraftwerk-style electronics.

So what's new in this game of society? Fewer literary references, less emotional fervor, fewer guitars. It's a game of subtraction that the Cavriago trio plays. Bass and drumming sweep away the six strings, while Collini's anecdotes grow colder, as icy as the cutting wind off the port of Arcangelo, as he himself might put it. It's a revolution turning into the norm, this Offlaga revolution, one in which the red backdrop grows paler, though still very much present ("Palazzo Masdoni"), and in which there's less and less room even for passion, for love.

Sport, politics, stories of youth: these are the themes from which Collini launches his sociological reflections on an Italy that, seen through the eyes of an eighties adolescence, we like to think was better than today's. Conveniently ignoring that the very same contradictions of back then are what our much-maligned nation still rests on today — something Max looks at with a subdued tone that intertwines with the equally disenchanted mood of the more intimate episodes ("Parlo Da Solo", "Desistenza").

On April 4, 2014 came the devastating news of the death of Enrico Fontanelli, announced in a statement posted by Max Collini and Daniele Carretti on the band's Facebook page: "This is Daniele and Max. We have terrible news to share. Last night Enrico Fontanelli, our brother forever in this adventure called Offlaga Disco Pax and co-founder of the band with us, left us. He hadn't been well for some time, but we certainly didn't imagine an ending like this, and we have no words to express our feelings to his partner Elena, to his beautiful baby girl Leila born just a few months ago, to his family, to his brothers Andrea and Fabrizio, to his friends, and to the many, many people who knew and loved him. Anyone who wishes may come to pay their respects today, Friday April 4, at the wake, which will be open from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm at the mortuary of the Santa Maria Nuova hospital in Reggio Emilia, on Via Benedetto Croce. The wake will reopen tomorrow morning, Saturday April 5, from 8:00 am to 2:45 pm. The funeral will also be held tomorrow, Saturday April 5, starting at 2:45 pm at the wake on Via Benedetto Croce, from where we will accompany him to the cemetery of San Giovanni di Querciola, in the municipality of Viano (RE). Goodbye Enrico, we will try to honor every day the endless wonders you gave us during the beautiful years we spent together with you."

Enrico Fontanelli was born in 1977 in Reggio Emilia. He created all the artwork for the albums released by Offlaga, and in 2012 he won the "Best Art Vinyl Italy" award for his work on Gioco di Società.

In 2013 he handled the artistic direction for the successful Glamour, the second album by I Cani.

After the painful and premature death of Enrico Fontanelli, which brought a definitive end to the Offlaga Disco Pax experience, Max Collini found, in his collaboration with Jukka Reverberi of Giardini di Mirò, an opening through which he could keep clothing his stories of historical materialism and class struggle in sound. The project actually began in 2007, through sporadic encounters that took shape as the "Letture emiliane" project, but it was only from 2014 onward that this occasional collaboration took on a continuous form, materializing as a tour and six live-recorded tracks, gathered on a now hard-to-find little disc. Thanks to Woodworm, Spartiti takes on an even more tangible identity, with support for what amounts to the duo's true debut — an idea in many ways similar to the one pursued by Emidio Clementi (Italy's other great spoken-word performer) with Corrado Nuccini (another longtime member of Giardini di Mirò), even if the subject matter is (at least on the surface) quite different. The political backdrop is always present in Collini's thoroughly enjoyable storytelling, with memories partly autobiographical (like the hilarious tale "Vera", about a teenage Massimiliano caught between early party-branch duties and infatuated young students) and partly built around faded Emilian snapshots. In "Sendero luminoso", Max even revisits a manifesto he wrote by hand in the 1980s together with his comrade Arturo Bertoldi, using it, with great self-deprecating humor, to portray an (at the time) aspiring surveyor caught up in militant activism, a true pro-revolutionary from the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. In three cases, by contrast, he performs other people's writing: the opening "Io non ce la faccio" is the memorable incipit of Paolo Nori's "Bassotuba non c'è"; the disillusionment of "Babbo Natale" is the work of Simone Lenzi of Virginiana Miller; and the closing "Ti aspetto" is the only piece drawn from a woman's pen, an excerpt from Simona Vinci's novel "Stanza 411".

Many of the stories collected on Austerity, released in March 2016, might seem out of time, especially to younger generations, but on closer inspection they remain frighteningly relevant, and Collini certainly proves capable of formulating thoughts far sharper and more focused than the hot air dished out by so many politicians from his own cultural background. It's all the more enjoyable for anyone who lived through the Pantera student pseudo-movement, "the most depoliticized ever in our solar system", the only one in which the collective didn't need to include any actual activists among its ranks. Equally worth noting are Reverberi's precious musical details, which move away from the Offlaga Disco Pax approach to edge closer, at times, to the post-rock of certain Massimo Volume moments, especially when guitars emerge alongside the electronic beds, as on the title track. There could be no better way to carry forward an idea of socio-political storytelling, of which Offlaga were, in recent times, the brightest, most meaningful and most successful expression. Not losing a protagonist of such an unconventional way of making music is something that enriches our independent underground, especially if you love those who strive to assert more considered, more "engaged" ideas than the average of our times.

Collini and Reverberi toured the length and breadth of the peninsula with these songs for quite a while, and a few months later, on January 23, 2017, they released a fine follow-up, Order service (again on the Woodworm label), presented as an EP but in reality representing much more, both in terms of running time and the importance it adds to the project's perspective. The record is split, conceptually, into two halves: the first two tracks draw on writings by Marco Philopat and Arturo Bertoldi, rooted in the history of our country. The first (the title track) captures an episode involving Andrea Bellini, head of the security detail of the politicized Casoretto movement in Milan, during the turbulent antagonism of the early 1970s. "Ida e Augusta", on the other hand, is the story of two German women who moved to the Emilian Apennines during the First World War and who managed to save the small village of Gombio from Nazi-Fascist roundups during the Resistance: it sounds like a fable, but it's based on real events. The second half instead centers on the hilarious personal anecdotes written and narrated by Collini, set between the 1980s and 1990s, during his teenage years: we see the ever-upright Max grappling with a youthful love affair that leads him to discover the greatest grunge band of all time ("Elena e i Nirvana"), and a funny misunderstanding with a much older, attractive woman ("Borghesia"). But a record signed Spartiti should never be over-explained — it's like a book, like a film: the listener shouldn't be robbed of the pleasure of discovery, word after word, of seeing where the story is headed.

The musical formula remains the tried-and-tested one, but important developments can be spotted: Collini's spoken word is still grafted onto the post-rock beds architected by Reverberi, at times following delicate guitar lines, at other times leaning on electronic beats, but the driving rhythmic suggestions found on "Order service" (the song) are something new for the duo. For "Borghesia", they opted instead for a 70s soft-core-cinema approach (perfectly in line with the pseudo-erotic misunderstandings of the lyrics), while the guitar embroidery running through "Ida e Augusta" is fragile and nocturnal, close to the rarefied sounds that made "Da qui" by Massimo Volume famous. Massimo Volume themselves, an artistic reference never hidden by Max and Jukka, are paid tribute on the closing track, taken from a live performance — an outright act of love for "Qualcosa sulla vita", a sprawling piece of poetry that recalls an episode from the period when Emidio Clementi worked for a moving company. The ending is enriched by a personal instrumental coda that ferries the song toward unexpected paths, edging it to within a stone's throw of noise.

It's not easy to keep the listener's attention and curiosity high with so few ingredients at your disposal: a sign that the material – both lyrical and musical – remains first-rate. The one offered by the two Spartiti is a novel to be listened to, where the narrative structure takes on decisive importance: take half an hour of free time, close your eyes and picture these short stories, a microcosm that starts from the author's personal experience to become universal.

Contributions by Marco Pagliariccio ("Board game")

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