DANIELE BRUSASCHETTO - Mezza Luna Piena

"Strana la vita sulla terra, dove sarà il dietro le quinte?" Daniele Brusaschetto is a singer-songwriter from Turin, active since the mid-90s with his debut EP "Paturnie" in '96. To date, with this "Mezza Luna Piena", he has released a full five albums. He plays frequently around Europe and has toured the United States. And he remains a total unknown in Italy. His Italy, his Turin, a grey and grieving city not always capable of properly honouring its own bards.

The moods of Brusaschetto's music are dark, shadowy and often obsessive, but not without flashes of a (in his own way) luminous intimacy. A warmth that occasionally seeps through the music, only to be inexorably swept away by torrential cascades of clattering, free-roaming drum machines and a stinging guitar style rather unusual in a singer-songwriter context. And while his supporter, friend and producer Bruno Dorella points to hidden metal influences (though not too hidden - just listen to "Criptico" to believe it) in Brusaschetto's music, far more evident are the similarities with singer-songwriters of analytical malaise such as Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Franco Battiato, artists who taught most of the best names in Italian underground rock (and the latter, in turn, had a considerable influence on the former).

Of some significance is his absolute reluctance to abandon the song format, which in necessarily non-commercial contexts like this one is anything but an easy choice. Even the instrumental tracks, and there are several, always have a well-defined structure, though never to the point of being predictable - a trait that holds true for every song on the record, which move between shifting atmospheres capable of passing in a few moments from the contemplative lightness of an acoustic guitar ("Bandieralvento"), to cold glitch patterns ("In limitato contorno"), all the way to the thunderous physicality of repeated industrial charges, the author's true stylistic signature.

The words are abrasive, delivered with difficulty and torment, far removed both from Battiato's austere melodiousness and from the rambling neurasthenia of early Ferretti. Indeed, Brusaschetto's work recalls more the late-period Cccp, before their traditionalist shift into Csi, when the Emilian group was opening up to electronics and to a still very cold form of pop music - albeit with ethnic references that are absent in Brusaschetto (except perhaps in "Ultima Thule", which starts off gently atmospheric before spilling into a central movement closer to Ministry than to the Third Ear Band, and the intro of "Ego mangiato crudo").

The Turin that emerges in the background is close to the psychotic one of My Cat Is An Alien and the forgotten Soul Chette Winde, but here the dimension is nonetheless more private and existential, without ever giving in to the easy rhetoric of "Me, you, a piano, a lit fire and the whole world out there". Also absolutely worth noting is "Vita sulla terra", which coasts for its entire length on a (gorgeous) guitar riff lifted from Weezer's "Undone (The Sweater Song)" and reworked to fit the album's claustrophobic, yet in its own way lunar, atmosphere.

In short, a record that deserves to break out of anonymity, and it wouldn't be too much of a cliché to call it "absolutely exportable", not least because the facts and the acclaim the author has received abroad prove it even before the music does - music that is modern, yet tends, as few others do, especially through its lyrics, to feel timeless. It's strange how those who could live out their artistic experience in the sun, out in the open, so often end up stuck behind the curtain instead.

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30/04/2026