FABRIZIO TESTA - Free Camilletti! Ep

Milan-based Fabrizio Testa is an experimental singer-songwriter and a multifaceted composer, friend and occasional musical ally of Alessandro Camilletti (aka Psycho Kinder). Having already left his mark on the Italian underground scene with various projects under his own name and under pseudonyms (Il Lungo Addio), Testa returns in 2016 with the Ep “Free Camilletti!”, subtitling his creation as a sort of vademecum on the abandoned wastelands of the human psyche (“Easy Listening for Nichilistic Youth”). Right from its title, “Free Camilletti!” thus reveals itself as a kind of concept album on nihilism, one that nonetheless – precisely for this reason – doesn't take itself too seriously, aiming instead to subliminate in music a bond of artistic and human understanding, paying tribute along the way to the figures who most shaped the personalities of the two singer-songwriters; from the Death In June of “Free Tibet” to the NON of Boyd Rice from the compilation “Easy Listening for Iron Youth”, down to the short-lived punk project Crisis, the first band of Douglas P. and Tony Wakeford.

The EP consists of one unreleased track, a cover, and four remixes, flowing together as a seamless narrative continuum, driven by Alessandro Camilletti's voice and animated by Fabrizio Testa's electronic textures. It opens with the new version of "Terreno K (Dance Remix)", loosely inspired by Pupi Avati's "Zeder", the sci-fi horror film set in the Emilia-Romagna countryside. Just like the zombies in the film, the cover of "Un uomo (FT Version)" instead resurrects the primordial post-punk of Psycho Kinder, who after Testa's operation wake up murmuring a pulsing, icy electro-industrial litany addressed to nihilism ("sono un uomo/ o forse non lo sono mai stato"). The ghost of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, high priest of nothingness, also looms as a menacing presence over "Free Camilletti!", the only unreleased track in the set, which aims precisely to disorient the listener, pinned against the wall by Testa's occult choirs and funereal tolling.

There's also room for a sonic remake with a gentler tone, steeped in the mystical neo-realism of "Marco Pierantoni (Piano Remix)", a stripped-down rendering of its original alienating wall of sound, where Camilletti's clean vocal, together with Alberto Dessì's piano, becomes a perfect vehicle to seal the requiem of a man who vanished into nothingness and who, precisely for this reason, rises to become the very personification of nihilism tout-court (“che fine ha fatto? dove si trova adesso?/ non ha più il Jaguar scassato, fuma ancora trenta sigarette al giorno?/ frequenta ancora le puttane?”). An existential unease destined to later take on the more familiar face of Simone Cattaneo ("troppo bello per essere un pugile/ troppo brutto per fare il magnaccia"), the latter-day poète maudit who took his own life in 2009, to whom "Saronno (Suburb Remix)" is dedicated, now dressed in more synthetic clothing.

In the end, the distance from the bitter inland Lombardy to the Romagna beaches so dear to Testa turns out to be short; the spectral hauntology music of "Cesenautico (Africa Remix)" indeed completes a journey of disorientation and the collapse of Western values, drowning the listener in the unease hidden behind the summery clichés of the Romagna riviera, ultimately unveiling, in reverse, the most hermetic winter nostalgia of one of our peninsula's seaside paradises.

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19/10/2016