GIANLUCA BECUZZI - American Requiem

The decline of the American empire

by Peppe Trotta

A new piece is added to the collaboration active since 2020 that sees Gianluca Becuzzi producing under the St.An.Da/Silentes label run by Stefano Gentile. A solid bond that has so far yielded four double albums centered on the correlation between the sacred and sound, explored through the retrieval and revision of twentieth-century avant-garde instances. For the fifth chapter of the series – again a double release – the Tuscan musician's interest shifts from the Hindu myth of the goddess Kali to the decadence of the capitalist era embodied by the socio-political state of the United States.

The pitch-dark blend of drone music and doom textures, fed by the modulations of razor-sharp guitars, remains a solid constant, but the ethnic echoes of the predecessor are here replaced by elements drawn from American musical tradition. The introductory dark-ambient of "Oh Death Part I" turns into an ancestral blues chant, triggering a temporal short-circuit from which a sulphurous magma emerges, one that in the following "Rising And Falling" lets the voice of Nero Kane take center stage over a deeply dark backdrop. It's a spectral mood that pervades the whole work, whose two parts follow the identical scheme made up of a two-part track placed at the opening and close, with two sprawling flows in between.

In its second part, bookended by the two halves of "U.S. Ghosts", the apocalyptic dimension of the whole is pushed toward a sense of extreme desolation, taking on a convulsed form of disintegrating voices and sounds before regaining momentum in the glacial expansion of "Desert Widows" and pouring into a grieving requiem with no chance of redemption. What Becuzzi enacts is a fierce critique in the form of a sonic ritual more incisive than words.

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A drone that comes to life

by Valerio D’Onofrio

The song of American slaves, the authentic blues of its origins, Alan Lomax's field recordings: whether all of this represented a part of the American dream or, on the contrary, the litmus test of a society built on inequality, is the conceptual core of the new work by drone master Gianluca Becuzzi.

The elements of country blues tradition, the voices of preachers, archaic chants are immersed in a violent drone sea that envelops them, tears them from their original timeframe and renders them eternal. A death knell for what remains of the American dream, a dream that has by now become a requiem intoning its own end (“The Time Is Over”).

Becuzzi draws from the past the typical blues chant of the slaves (“Oh Death”), in which death appears as the only possible escape from a life of constraints, alongside the shouts of frenzied preachers and chants suspended on the thin line between life and death. Split into two parts, “Oh Death” is the record's manifesto, the clearest synthesis of its musical vision: in the first part, slow guitar notes follow one another until making way for the recording of a preacher, whose voice overlaps with the instrument before slowly being overwhelmed by it; in the second, everything melts into an indivisible sonic magma.

The metallic drone of Sunn O))) takes center stage in “Rising And Falling”, with lyrics by Nero Kane: the string vibrations are physical, oppressive, while a melody drawn from “Passover” by Joy Division builds an imposing sonic scaffolding.

“Rethoric And Fear Of God”, clocking in at sixteen minutes, pays homage to one of Becuzzi's great loves, Michael Gira's Swans, through a monster-track made of walls of sound, distortions and slow emotional collapses. The chant of “The Time Is Over” sounds like an omen, an epitaph foretold. The same goes for “U.S. Ghosts” (also split into two parts), which underscores the hauntological persistence of an old America, surviving as an immortal ghost in the guts of a new nation gutted by divisions of every kind. The recordings follow one another forming a whirlwind of words that overlap until becoming incomprehensible. The second part takes on openly religious traits, later interrupted by screams that can lead to nothing but more screams: a perfect metaphor for the incommunicability of a fractured nation.

“American Requiem” is a radical conceptual and sonic experience, a drone that comes to life and begins to communicate — but only with those who have the courage to truly undertake this journey.

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14/12/2025