DEDO - Flow

The mature “guy with a guitar who uses a computer to make music” had already shown, back with his debut “Solar Day”, that he couldn't be lumped in with the countless laptop tinkerers out there, proving - alongside a forthright electronic streak not without a taste for dance music - his ability to cultivate and recast in the present tense the echoes of a youth spent amid shoegaze guitars, much like so many current thirty- and forty-somethings.

Should his lineage (or rather, his predilections) not already be clear enough, Bologna's Stefano Panzera makes them even more explicit on the second album released under his alias Dedo, once again produced under the careful supervision of Giacomo Fiorenza (who has also produced names such as Giardini di Mirò, Paolo Benvegnù and Offlaga Disco Pax).

Distinctive from its packaging onward - a sheet of fluorescent yellow plexiglas - “Flow” gathers forty minutes of enveloping electronic currents, once again peppered with electronic pulses and slashes, but also with guitar whirls more prominent than ever, often filtered and translated into hazy ambient blankets, but more often left free to evolve into propulsive surges that recall shoegaze as much as the intersections between rock and dance music of the golden age of Madchester.

Panzera thus largely manages to break free from his kinship with a now internationally significant band like Port-Royal, and more generally from electro-gaze translations of rhythms that, while retaining their own original “rock” imprint, decisively wink at the dancefloor. It's true that “Flow” still contains electronic expanses and cadences close to idm, yet the nine tracks on the record firmly steer the Bolognese artist's musical course toward enveloping abstractions, at times closer to an ambient music dense with saturation (“Flow”, “Blunten Blumen Fur P.”), but more often hinged on barely-processed feedback that surfaces to reveal Valentine-esque walls of sound, dance steps both full-bodied and ethereal, and above all melodic shards riding on equally filtered vocals, giving rise to vividly colourful, sun-drenched visions, far removed from the oppressive haze that often characterizes works of this kind.

The presence of four tracks that could well be called “songs” is indeed one of the most notable new features of “Flow”. Evenly split between the vocal performances of Lavinia De Santoli and Alain Marenghi, these pieces cloak in a postmodern electronic aura melodic fragments poised between the dark cadences and dreamy chants of Charlatans (just listen to “The Plunge” to believe it) and the evanescent melodies of Primal Scream and Chapterhouse, which are especially echoed by the sinuous harmonic twists of “The Wave”, here enriched precisely by its vocal component compared to the version Dedo gave to the free download compilation OndaDrops Vol.2.

Overall, “Flow” marks an excellent stage of development for a project that clearly reflects the Bolognese artist's passion, one that gladly transcends modern modes of expression and revivalist trends to carve out his own stylistic territory in which to simply do whatever he pleases. And in an age of more or less cerebral formalism, that's no small thing.

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27/10/2010