BONO / BURATTINI - Ora sono un lago

I am silver and exact 

I am not cruel, only truthful

I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart

Now I am a lake

Images from three short films, the words of a great poet. There's always a well-defined, cultured starting point in the music of Francesca Bono and Vittoria Burattini, and at the same time there's never a fixed destination. There's always a woman behind the scenes – Maya Deren there, Sylvia Plath here – muse for an art that follows one route only: the untrodden one. There's music, but no song-form. There's always the urge to experiment, to push further still: and in that sense, if "Sound in a transfigured time" was the snapshot of music-making that flowed naturally, spontaneously, "Ora sono un lago" is the work of a partnership that knows perfectly well where it wants to go – and above all where it doesn't.

The first thing that stands out about this second studio effort, entrusted to the production of Francesco Donadello, is the choice to push even further. Its courage, the need – one might say – to go beyond what had already been done three years ago. If on one hand, perhaps inevitably, this affects the ease of listening, on the other it's the freedom underpinning this array of solutions that gives such music-making its force and momentum, looking to psychedelia as much as to minimalist electronics, brushing here and there against ambient (listen to "Fragili danze") and post-rock, taking on "kosmic" accents (the title track) and marking out hieratic, at times martial rhythms, heavy as boulders, onto which Bono's typically ethereal vocal lines are grafted ("Prove d'esistenza/Il gesto").

And then there are spectral reverberations ("Come un riflesso"), digital short-circuits dissolving into ever more distant echoes ("Acrobata"), even synthwave outposts – "Tra le labbra" – that would fit perfectly into revivalist soundtracks à-la "Stranger Things", right through to the acoustic drift of "Lonely blue star", the final metamorphoses within the boundaries of this sonic labyrinth with no way out.

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08/04/2026