NICHELODEON - FLIPPER (Folk Songs For The Judgement Day)

An hour and forty minutes of music compressed into a hypothetical, never-ending suite titled "Distopia". Claudio Milano has already accustomed us to ambitious works that refuse any kind of compromise, but with "Flipper (Folk Songs For The Judgement Day)" he pushes past every threshold of reasonableness and common sense, venturing beyond the imaginable. It's a work that seems literally impossible in an age of fast, distracted, compulsive streaming: half-hour-long tracks, an exasperated density of words and music, an accumulation of quotations and sonic debris for an album that, by all rights, shouldn't exist today.

The idea for "Flipper" was born around twenty years ago as a tribute to the centenary of Luciano Berio (1925–2003), and in particular to his "Folk Songs" and his "Beatles Songs": examples of a learned crossing-over into popular and pop music. But Claudio Milano radically reverses the operation. Where Berio carried popular material into the realm of art music, ennobling it, "Flipper" instead turns pop and folk into junkyard objects lost to memory. At the same time, it performs the inverse of the more traditional mainstream move: it goes from pop to classical (as Berio did), a far nobler and more complex operation than the now all-too-frequent, almost always trivializing, simplification of classical music turned into sound-material palatable to every taste. The result is a deranged sonic object that ricochets through twentieth-century musical history like a pinball, with no apparent order. "Distopia" – six movements spanning almost a hundred minutes – is a colossal experiment in the degenerative transformation of folk and popular music: a schizophrenic flow of discontinuous musical thoughts, devoid of narrative development, governed by an internal logic that remains deliberately opaque.

Onto this magma is grafted the electronics of borda (Teo Ravelli), fresh off "Ta-pum" (2025): drones, manipulations and noise build an apocalyptic, repressive backdrop to Milano's twentieth-century-style singing and pianism. The project comes into focus through contrast: where Berio sought a historical synthesis, Milano certifies its impossibility. Like the Residents, he digs through the junkyard of popular memory, creating a monstrous collage to be put on display on judgement day. Folk is no longer a root, but the degraded soundtrack of the post-apocalypse.

In "Distopia #1 – Nobiltà Decaduta" (thirty minutes), chamber pianism coexists with twentieth-century avant-garde, melodies by Édith Piaf, Tori Amos, Luigi Tenco and many others, right down to a religious chant reduced to obsessive fragments, almost a prayer with no one left to receive it. The voice turns into a loop, evoking minimalist structures in the vein of Philip Glass, while the music crystallizes into a static, resolutely non-narrative environment, able to hold its entire history simultaneously, in a single instant, outside of space and time.

Milano definitively destroys the song form, sabotaging it from within and celebrating its decomposition. After years of experimentation, his music seems to reach a terminal stage: a final, putrefied farewell to folk songs. And yet "Flipper" is also a revolutionary gesture, a work out of step with its time. In an age ruled by the dictatorship of entertainment, it's a work that refuses any consolation and any compromise, overturning the very idea of listening.

A militant, alien, uncompromising work, "Flipper" claims the right to be incompatible with the present. The word "Trumpf" on the cover – roughly translatable as winning card, victory – used like a grotesque comic-strip caption, alludes to a world dominated by imperial rhetoric, wars and rearmament. Another sign of its estrangement from the times.

The version available on Bandcamp is the full hundred-minute one, and it's the version this review refers to. The one on Spotify and on CD is a shortened, seventy-seven-minute edit.

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17/01/2026