LARSEN LOMBRIKI - Free From Deceit Or Cunning

Even in Italy we can boast a few small legends of the musical underground. One of them has been living in Rome for a few years now, making its presence known through sporadic (or maybe even frequent) releases, but always under different identities, often invented on the spur of the moment: what I'm writing about here is the second album (after "Glad To Be Here" from 1999, again for Snowdonia) released under the name Larsen Lombriki. And what kind of music do these Lombriki make? The website of Rotoraudio, their production label, lists a plethora of bands and (downloadable) songs, all of which actually trace back to the same group of people. Genuine red herrings, invented bands and records, and other pranks link this anomalous collective to a Residents-style philosophy, and the musical fruit that results is ambiguous, since these guys never let on whether their intentions are truly serious, in the common sense of the term, or not, crafting a sort of non-declaration of intent, or declaration of non-intent, that always manages to wrongfoot the listener. In practice, listening to their record you find yourself smiling right away, but immediately afterwards you start wondering if perhaps you're the one being made a fool of; and vice versa, in a potential short circuit: an object that, whichever way you look at it, gives back a distorted perspective.

The music of Larsen Lombriki is clearly the result of several heterogeneous minds at work: what emerges is a multifaceted, unpredictable proposition. "Free From Deceit Or Cunning" is made up of 20 tracks for about an hour of music and, beyond the considerations above, contains fairly heterogeneous music, even though the ideas seem to unfold in a less scattered way than on the previous record, and the sound is overall more aggressive: cut-ups of sometimes antithetical elements thus form farcical piano-bar music ("Skilled At Something"), aggressive projectiles halfway between Chrome and Cabaret Voltaire ("Kosuth Youth"), fun saloon blues in "Happy Hyped Hippy (With A Whip)", pills of new-dark (perfectly captured in "Anytime"), insistent electro-industrial hammering in the vein of Suicide ("Honey"), fake post-rock, shards of kraut-rock ("Can You Imagine Me"), scraps of blues reflected in the funhouse mirrors of a fairground haunted by the captain's shadow, all wrapped up with a chant that fades into a Ridolini-style slapstick ending, one final smirk aimed at the listener.

The music is fittingly mirrored by the images featured in the record: monstrous yet familiar and endearing montages, or ones completely devoid of sense. They could well portray us listeners: monstrous whenever — all too often — we delude ourselves into thinking we understand and can categorize things, until we run into lombriki capable of dismantling any preconception. The indelible fil rouge is that sense of estrangement and alienation, which will always make you look at this record on the shelf with fondness or wariness, and then fondness again and then wariness once more... and the one who risks the most is precisely the one who convinces himself he's understood something, like the person writing this.

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30/04/2026