ADRIANO ZANNI - Songs To The Sirens

Surrounded by silence, obstinately searching for the comforting voice of the sea. Deeply marked by the sudden escalation of the pandemic emergency, the year now drawing to a close has certainly been defined by a vast artistic output born of the creeping unease and uncertainty brought on by social upheaval and prolonged confinement. And firmly within this prolific creative wave sits the new work by Adriano Zanni, the third piece of his personal puzzle in this bumpy, turbulent 2020.

Clearly inspired by one of the most precious gems written by Buckley senior, “Songs To The Sirens” sees the musician/photographer from Ravenna continue his audiovisual exploration of the immersive scenery of his home territory. Images and sound have by now become truly inseparable components of his storytelling, elements that constantly merge and blur into one another to achieve mutual completeness. The silent, essential monochrome photographs thus once again become the perfect echo of a sinuous, contemplative resonant flow, shaped by combining analogue and digital frequencies with tactile ambient reverberations, extracted and collected over years spent gathering fragments of life from the Romagna coastline.

Guiding us along the route is precisely the perpetual motion of the liquid expanse breaking on the shore, an indispensable presence that saturates the different dimensions of this two-way path, becoming the vanishing point of every snapshot captured and the distinct breath that emerges constantly from the very start, in the expansive textures of “23 febbraio, la mattina perfetta”, the emblematic point of origin from which a fervid imaginary unfolds, rich in biographical references and cinematic inspirations. The sense of in(de)finiteness, which the gaze takes in as it loses itself in the amniotic horizon, projects us into a hypnagogic sonic environment of synthetic vapours that uses material data as an anchor to hold onto the memory of lived experience.

It is a vivid territory made of restless churning (“Non sta mai fermo”) and dark anticipation (“Facevo del mio meglio per sorridere”), of sudden acid flashes (“Adriatico lisergico”) and convulsive playfulness (“Tutti contro tutti”), a landscape into which pour the elegiac, sorrowful visionary quality of Tarkovsky's “Solaris” (“Forse era un sogno”) and the existential malaise that permeates that “Red Desert” which has played such a large part in Zanni's output and is once again explicitly cited here in the closing track.

Non sta mai fermo. Mai. Mai, mai

Io non riesco a guardare a lungo il mare

Sennò tutto quello che succede a terra non mi interessa più

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24/12/2020