FLAVIO GIURATO - Il Console Generale

After the most careful consideration

the inimitable breath of the Tibetan archers

is what I recommend

for the tuning of all human beings

in all prisons, public and personal

For Flavio Giurato, time carries a Parmenidean meaning. It's no coincidence, in fact, that the Roman singer-songwriter pushes the clock hands further and further ahead with each new record. Giurato's songbook has never feared the logic of the market, and for decades it has moved like a comet on an elliptical orbit, facing the sun again only after circling its own system, keeping well away from the lethal allure of debris, planets and satellites.

“Il Console Generale” doesn't escape the particular laws of Giurato-ian physics — consider that, as the musician himself explains, “no music stand or written lyrics were needed to record it, and there was no diaphragm between the microphone and the sound.” And further: “In keeping with the phases of the moon, the record was never forced into line by any analogue or digital metronome.”

As with “Il manuale del cantautore” and “The Disappearance of Majorana”, this time too Giurato works by subtraction, composing eight oblique songs from which elusive stories emerge, at times borrowed from private, bygone events, as in “Laura e il Cubano”.

Giurato starts from a golden rule: always avoid alignment, no matter what. But given the times, his mission is so complicated that it would make even a modern-day Juan Pujol Garcia falter, at least on paper.

And yet, somehow, the diver of Italian singer-songwriter music pulls it off, once again evading the absurd and pathetic rules of the game, stringing together one novella after another, apparently bare yet full of life, moving with fearless ease from the irreverent journey into a child's cosmos before falling asleep (“Intrepid Cosmonaut”) to the never-healing tattoo of Auschwitz Birkenau, exorcised, surprisingly, through a shamanic dance (“Tahiti Tamuré”).

Then comes love made impossible by technological non-conformities, told through a light-footed little song that briefly overturns the moods of a record that's as alien as it is, in essence, alienated (“Ricarica”).

At Piazza Verbano

at the sharpest focal point

of the coming action

there's Carlo Delle Piane

called into position

ready to shoot

Silence partout

s'il vous plaît

ça tourne!

Giurato also celebrates, in his own way, the open-air sets of a bygone Rome, now extinct, and to do so he once again strips things bare, lays them to waste, assembles and disassembles the pieces of what's left of a broken-down soul (“Atene 4”). It's the beating heart of the album, before a piano rekindles the light inside the room, with the Capital this time as the epicenter of an untamed poetics, amid archers, saboteurs, landings and storms (“Il console generale”).

I am the Consul General

my rules of engagement

I tell you them deep in my soul

with flesh for courage

we'll be what we've done

we'll be what we've done

we'll be the blood we'll carry

we'll be the blood we'll have spilled

In a singer-songwriter scene that's growing ever paler, with the so-called "young" indie troubadours more concerned with gazing inward, and all the tedium that entails, than with finally restoring the need for an outward gaze, seventy-seven-year-old Flavio Giurato raises the bar with the awareness of a Duplantis challenging his own shadow, rediscovering himself free and reaching even higher.

"Caravan" finally comes into play, shattering the record's essentialism with an irresistible gallop craving mirages, oases and dunes to stretch out on and maybe make love. It's the unexpected embrace of the hermit come down from the top of a cliff to gaze magically around him after having taken in everything.

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16/03/2026