SIMONE FELICI, MARCO VERDECCHIA - Worms

In progressive rock, the concept of world-building has never simply been perceived as metaphor.
From the abstraction of Gong to the cosmic mythology of Magma, the construction of parallel universes has often been a means of turning music into a form of total narrative, capable of uniting three fundamental elements: sound, imagination, and its own philosophy. “Worms” (Rous-Telatau, 2025), the project by Dear Bongo frontman Simone Felici (bass, synth) and Marco Verdecchia (piano, synth), in collaboration with Gianluca Panici (drums), was born precisely out of this need: to give shape to a self-contained universe, sprung from a dream and translated into a concept album with a strongly visionary bent.

The genesis of the record is already an integral part of its poetics. Rather than a collection of songs unified by a narrative thread, what we find here is a story that surfaced from the unconscious, accompanied by musical fragments that resurfaced upon waking and were gradually developed together with Verdecchia. The protagonist of this universe is Worms, a celestial body shaped like a metallic head, asleep in space and the unwitting creator of the planet Niibs. Within his dream a world takes shape, inhabited by two anthropomorphic populations: a society of dwarves and a mysterious race of headless, legless quadruped baby elephants. The science-fiction tale that emerges as you listen becomes an allegory on the nature of power and the mechanisms of history.
The album's structure follows the narrative arc of a journey, but also that of a possible video-game adventure. The song titles trace an at times cinematic progression: from the birth of the cosmic entity (“Celestial Body Worms”) to an inner journey (“Melancholic Journey”), through to the depiction of the dwarves' civilization, their rebellion, and the final vision of the Niibs.

The sequence of episodes recalls the exploratory logic of video games: the gradual discovery of an unknown world, encounters with new populations, overcoming trials, and reaching a final destination. It's no coincidence that the project was born alongside the idea of an 8-bit-style video game (Koji Kondo, Hirokazu Tanaka), later left unfinished. The album's chiptune version therefore doesn't come across as a mere nostalgic experiment, but as a natural extension of the “Worms” universe. This fusion of symbolic depth and playful dimension is probably the most original aspect of Felici and Verdecchia's work. “Worms” looks to the great tradition of imaginary worlds in progressive rock, preserving the childlike wonder of discovery in keeping with the central figure of its protagonist, whose appearance is itself childlike.
The need to tell of humanity's urge to invent new worlds, in order to better understand the one we live in, is the starting point for approaching “Worms”.

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08/08/2026