Votiva Lux - Psychedelic Emilia

Among the most interesting acts to emerge from the Italian underground scene in recent years, Emilia's Votiva Lux represent the most experimental wing of homegrown alternative rock, with songs that blend psychedelia in the vein of Pink Floyd with the "spatial" post-rock of bands like Tortoise. But it wasn't always this way: the band's story is in fact long and winding, spanning almost fifteen years, even though it was only in 2000 that they emerged from the fog of the underground and self-releases. The band's peculiar, expansive and visionary sound of today was arrived at after numerous shifts in musical direction and line-up.

Initially, in fact, the band - as is easy to guess from the name - played a style with a clear "darkwave" stamp, a genre that was in vogue when Votiva Lux came to life in Bologna in 1988, the work of Giulio Sangirardi (guitar), Roberto Roda (bass) and Gabriele Bufalini (keyboards).

But it was only in 1991, when singer Diego Baroncini and drummer Andrea Contestabile joined the lineup, that Votiva Lux got the chance to record their first demo. Then in 1994, after building a following through intense live activity, with Baroncini replaced on vocals by Andrea Cavani, the band got the opportunity to begin work on their first album, released in 1996 under the title Il Canto Del Cigno. The record proved interesting and mature right away, thanks to tracks that manage to wed darkwave's dark atmospheres - underpinned by clever use of electronic keyboards - to musical structures that were already beginning to open up toward more elaborate sounds, thanks to splendid interweavings of acoustic and electric guitars. Tracks like "L'ultimo velo" and "Punto zero" are the finest examples of the band's strange balance between darkness and psychedelic visions achieved on this official debut.

The record effectively represents the "swan song" of the most markedly "dark" incarnation of Votiva Lux: as several passages on the album already suggest, the band's ambitions now reach much further, and so right after the record's release they do away with the singer to focus almost exclusively on instrumental compositions. The lineup finally finds stability in the quartet formed, alongside founders Giulio Sangirardi (guitar and effects) and Gabriele Bufalini (bass and keyboards), by new guitarist Andrea Ghidini and drummer Stefano Grassi.

The first release from the new Votiva Lux arrives in 2000 with the splendid Lindbergh EP, containing three long instrumental tracks ("Lindbergh", "English Summer", "4-7-97") that fall within the Tortoise lineage, and, rounding out the record, a gorgeous live cover of "Avalyn 2", one of the most evocative tracks (dating from 1990) by Slowdive, heroes of the "shoegazer" movement.

But it's in 2002 that Votiva Lux manage to create their most personal work, the one in which all their past and present influences find their point of maximum cohesion while at the same time being transcended through a truly personal style. The album Solaris above all features increasingly intricate instrumental textures, marked by sound effects that evoke cosmic music, with highly effective guitar interplay sketching out progressions of considerable evocative power, as in the splendid "Gasteropod 1". The album is steeped in suggestions drawn from the Celtic world, which come to a head on the opening track "Ffair", the album's only sung piece, with lyrics in Welsh by vocalist Brychan Llyr, and above all in the "conceptual" trilogy made up of "Inisheer", marked by delicate guitar arpeggios, "Inishmore", which introduces a more nervous and unstable mood, and the closing "Inishmaan", a beautiful, spectral vision of piano, distortion and indefinite noise.

Alongside fellow countrymen Giardini Di Mirò, Votiva Lux have become one of the most highly regarded Italian bands in the post-rock and new psychedelia scene, even - or rather, mainly - abroad, particularly in England where, at the time of their debut album, they were dubbed (albeit with the exaggerated enthusiasm typical of the British music press) the "Italian answer to Pink Floyd".

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