OFFLAGA DISCO PAX - Socialismo tascabile (Prove tecniche di trasmissione)

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 the Rockontest 2004, before this album even came out they'd already built an "underground" reputation thanks to a series 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, first and foremost because rather than offering a single reading, it leaves plenty of room for discussion, for the laborious task of figuring out what lies behind such a project and what ideas it's actually trying to put forward.

Listening to the record leaves you stunned and a little disoriented by its originality and by the sheer number of influences that have flowed into it.

The spoken-word, rather than sung, lyrics immediately bring to mind Massimo Volume, the themes echo those of Cccp, and the musical, electronic minimalism seems to draw something from Kraftwerk, Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire, going all the way up 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 milieu of the early '80s) 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 '70s and '80s, in a small town in Emilia called Cavriago.

But this isn't mere declamation or nostalgic reminiscing: it's through seemingly unconnected subjects — school conduct ("Kappler"), first love ("Khmer rossa"), or, surprisingly, a history of chewing gum ("Cinnamon") — that a portrait emerges of a particular historical moment, of a region and a neighbourhood "where the Communist Party used to get 74% of the vote." Amid the past, the present peeps through too, in ironic little vignettes about hating a shop assistant ("Tono metallico standard") or the end of a love affair, symbolised by a sponge slipper ("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, aptly titled "Robespierre", the memories are listed one by one, with no logical connection, no careful selection: simply everything that's left of an era.

And then, the cold shower: "Tatranky". Over eight minutes of spoken-word declamation and oppression that recall the glorious "Emilia Paranoica" by Cccp.

But from Emilia we move to present-day Prague, stripped of every Soviet symbol, absorbed by capitalism, where in the nightclubs they dance to Al Bano and Romina's "Felicità" and where even the wafer biscuits are made by a multinational.

It's in that "They really took everything from us" that closes the track that the meaning of the whole record can perhaps be traced: in resignation, in accepting having lost, of no longer being able to change things, of having gotten everything wrong, of no longer having anything to believe in blindly.

Here a reflection is in order: it's well known that political and protest songwriting 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-haired musicians able to reel off clichés on the thousand overused, outdated themes of the left.

If there's anyone who seems to have understood which direction political songwriting 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, it's pointless to keep talking about Che Guevara and Chiapas, and at the same time it's pointless to rail against McDonald's and multinationals.

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

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.

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30/04/2026