Subsonica

I want to travel the route that will take us there,

all the truths, nothing but the truth

I've got no consent to share, don't even try,

I'm the outlaw in orbit forever and ever

("Unidentified")

Mid-1990s – the dissolution of Italy's First Republic.

The fleeting sense of having left decades of forgettable administrative habits behind soon morphs into the most classic, Lampedusa-esque case of "everything changes so that nothing changes": amid the general uproar, Berlusconi rises to power while the old ex-Communist party galaxy shatters into pieces. Social centers reinforce their role as hubs of counterculture, ideal focal points around which to build self-managed music scenes, with genres like raggamuffin and (militant, posse-descended) hip-hop taking the lion's share. Turin, which had long been eager to shake off its stale identity as a working-class city, welcomes these new impulses with an energy that is both far removed from typical Piedmontese reserve and impatient to reveal a nocturnal streak kept hidden for too long within the folds of the urban underground. The stage for this new era is, above all, the Murazzi del Po: the arches and boathouses along the river's west bank, close to the central Piazza Vittorio Veneto, a place that already, in concept, offers a landing ground for new ways of experiencing the night — not all of them strictly legal.

The Murazzi ("the Walls" to regulars) is the ideal spot to lose yourself in the gentle lapping of the river water — and in that of drinks of rather uncertain alcohol content — to rack up late nights, and to shed the masks of routine in venues like Giancarlo, CSA Murazzi, Doctor Sax, and Lega dei Furiosi. It's also the perfect setting for Massimiliano Casacci, fresh off his stint with Africa Unite (first as sound engineer, then as guitarist) and by now well on his way to a professional music career after his post-punk beginnings with Carmody and Deafear in the Eighties. Spending time with a dub-and-synth devotee like Madaski (himself a post-punk veteran of Suicide Dada) let him dig deeper into the ins and outs of record production, which at the time was ideally oriented toward the cross-pollinated sounds of the English electronic scene, especially that of Bristol. Casacci is especially drawn to it, to the point of leaving Africa Unite right on the cusp of a deal with Polygram, chasing instead the dream of a career mostly behind the scenes, following in the footsteps of someone who took that very role to an advanced level: Brian Eno.

That intention, however, is destined to run aground right at the Murazzi, after a meeting with Samuel and Boosta and an invitation to join a concept suspended between songwriting and experimentation — the prelude to a partnership impeccable in its timing, methods and setting: Max, after all, already has a ready-made operational base (his father Ferruccio's former cinema, right on Piazza Vittorio), and needs new territory to explore just as much as his two bandmates need a skilled sculptor of sonic textures. On the shared ground between them lies a host of promising reference points: British electronic music (trip-hop, jungle, big beat), film scores (the sci-fi imagery of UFO, James Bond-style action movies, Starsky & Hutch-esque cop shows), cartoons (Samuel and Boosta both came up through the original lineup of Amici di Roland, a cover band specializing in TV theme tunes), and reggae/dub culture (still important within the antagonist scene, as well as closely tied to Casacci's own past). These premises lead to the recruitment of a specialist rhythm section, the duo of Ninja and Pierfunk, aka Doctor & Doctor.

Ho giorni grigi in cui io non mi riconosco,

volando un po' pesante, prendo dentro tutti i vetri,

m'incazzo, ronzando, come un amplificatore in paranoia

("Momenti di noia")

The debut album by Subsonica is still, to this day, a perfect snapshot of a specific time and place, contained within the few hundred meters separating Giancarlo (the club at the Murazzi) from CasaSonica, and steeped in the glitter of the post-rave counterculture spawned by the social centers. We're in Turin, but the snapshot also captures other experiences across Italy, such as that of Casino Royale, the first to pair typically dub structures with a sound indebted to Bristol on their "Sempre più vicini" (1995). The interplay of soul and hip-hop stylings, rubbery basslines, loop culture, and off-beat rhythms are all important reference points in shaping the Subsonica project, but what really drives the Turin outfit is above all the need to break free from a certain provincial aura through some healthy, self-aware experimentation.

If, in the Eighties, the title of a low-budget film read "I ragazzi di Torino sognano Tokyo e vanno a Berlino" ("The kids of Turin dream of Tokyo and go to Berlin"), by early 1997 the new generation of Turin natives no longer needs to dream of other places — they're perfectly happy right where they are, in the Murazzi's own private heaven, gathering around a band that embodies their zeitgeist.

One of the standout features of this blistering debut is its ability to pair the sonic aesthetic of an era built on technological opposites (synths and samplers on one side, lo-fi effects and retro gear on the other) with effective pop songwriting, steeped in ideological rejection of "a System that makes you uneasy, that constrains, that frustrates," to borrow Samuel's own words from his autobiography "ElettricaVita." The stylistic cohesion and experience (including, quite literally, in terms of age) of Casacci the "producer" shine through, but it's the personality of each individual member that fills out a complete palette of colors — evident in the filtered, layered precision of Ninja's drumming, the round, analog-saturated warmth of Pierfunk's bass, Boosta's cinematic orchestrations, and the vintage tremolo of Casacci's guitar: all signs of a sonic cross-contamination with few precedents in the history of Italian pop.

Samuel's vocal delivery stylistically distills the paths of Giuliano Palma/Alioscia Bisceglia of Casino Royale and Bunna of Africa Unite, remaining organic and coherent even in its edgiest moments (see the razor-sharp flow of "Come se" — dedicated to Silvia Baraldini and to all victims of wrongful imprisonment — or the venomous streak of "Non identificato").

Alongside tracks built around the immediacy of the pop song format ("Istantanee", "Onde quadre", "Cose che non ho"), Subsonica construct a sound that absorbs club culture (the soft, dreamy jungle of "Giungla Nord", the almost four-to-the-floor kick of "Velociraptor", both featuring Ninja at his finest), obsessive angularity (the off-beat riff of "Momenti di noia"), dub filtered through an electro lens (the rain-soaked "Preso blu"), and Seventies black-music undertones (the refined groove of "Funk Star"), all while never losing the clear-headedness of a band unafraid that the experiment might spiral out of control.

And on the sharp edges,

I want to play with skin against the edges,

I want to risk clinging on to the edges,

Falling into emptiness, always only on the edges

(“Onde quadre”)

“Subsonica” came out in the golden year of Italian rock, measuring itself right away against a list of formidable competitors like “Metal not Metal” by Bluvertigo, “CRX” by Casino Royale, “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” by Afterhours, “Tabula Rasa Elettrificata” by CSI; yet in that context, where every musician knew just how important it was to dare and take risks (a notion grasped even by the major labels, usually anaesthetised by the guaranteed profits of the mainstream), the work of these five Turin musicians stands out for how it captures the contemporary moment. If there's ever been a historical moment when rock had to get its hands dirty with electronic culture — even the strand most opposed to its own creed — it's 1997, and Subsonica are the first to turn that into a manifesto for their own take on pop, to the point that their “U.F.O.” (the club version of “Non identificato”) gets remixed by two major crews from the UK scene, Terminalhead and Resident Filters.

Listened to today, almost twenty-five years on, Casacci & co.'s debut sounds like one of the most coherent chapters in their discography, able to capture the thrill of electronic fever while pairing it with a combative urgency that remains unmatched — even compared to the later, more famous “Microchip emozionale” — in synthesising both the conventions and the disruptive elements of the alternative rock of the time.

Subsonica painted the present and future of underground Turin, becoming the musical touchstone of the Nineties in the city, just as Gigi Restagno (to whom the album is dedicated) had been in the previous decade thanks to his strong personality and his time in some of the city scene's historic bands (Blind Alley, Misfits, and Casacci's own Deafear).

Restagno never had a symbolic place like the arches of the Lungo Po at his disposal, but in all likelihood, listening to “Nicotina Groove” — that ideal downtempo soundtrack to a post-Murazzi hangover — he too would have felt represented.

Clouds in empty bottles like my thoughts

I'm looking for a bit of life to forget yesterday

it's raining and there's a surreal light on the street

neither day nor night, a sweet boreal limbo

(“Nicotina Groove”)

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02/05/2021