TRAPCOUSTIC - Innerlands

Punctual as a Swiss watch, the members of the Rome-based collective Borgata Boredom are back, indifferent to prevailing "hype" trends and the easy clichés of Italian indie, proof that they've always truly believed in the underground. This summer we left Grip Casino with his new work, and now comes the second effort from Trapcoustic (aka Stefano Di Trapani, who also carries on Maximilian I, Le Tazze and a myriad of other projects).

If Grip Casino has now taken a more accessible and communicative turn with his music, Di Trapani does exactly the opposite with "Innerlands", pushing to extremes certain aspects already present in "Bonsai Heart" and making them even more abstract and impenetrable. While on one hand this is admirable (namely, the stubborn urge to experiment at all costs in order to arrive at something unusual and, broadly speaking, uncontaminated), on the other hand one still has to arrive at a mature and original synthesis. The suspicion here is instead that our friends from Pigneto have let themselves go a bit too far, and that the game is dragging on longer than expected. It seems that what they once did as a joke is now becoming all too serious a matter. Fans of musical masochism will find joy and pleasure in it, but the rest of us poor unsuspecting listeners, at this point, have no choice but to hit "stop" on the CD player or skip the tracks using fast forward.

A shame, because there would actually be some good ideas in "Innerlands", but they get buried under things that aren't musical at all. In short, almost nothing happens on this record ("My Heart Is A Street" and "She's My Vice" are mere collages of ambient noise, a device that by now is as old as the hills), and on the rare occasions when there's something vaguely memorable (the brief intro "Innerlands", the folk lullaby "Baby" and "Feeling Of Beating"), it all gets deliberately buried under a frankly annoying acoustic sludge. Let's not even dwell on the various "scores" that consist of nothing but out-of-tune guitars and other tedious field recordings.

The pseudo Indian raga of "Sleeping On A Bed Of Snakes", the ethereal "Sirens" and the Barrett-esque "Just Right With You" are the true musical core of the record, the only three tracks that are genuinely worth listening to. Honestly speaking, one can only hope for a downsizing of this whole music scene. Sometimes having a bold idea just isn't enough. You also need to know how to put it into practice and turn it into something artistically worthwhile.

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14/11/2013