CCCP - CSI

Suddenly night falls/ the raw cold wedges in/ the city trembles/ livid, it trembles

An icy shiver seems to pervade Nature itself, the nocturnal landscape poised to ignite, as in a Bosch inferno, under the blows of mortar fire. Another night of war is about to begin, the umpteenth after three years. The voice carrying us to this place belongs to Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, on the second album by Csi, "Linea Gotica". The city's name is Sarajevo.

As if in a short circuit, these lines knit together the threads of experiences lived by Ferretti (the voice) and Massimo Zamboni (the guitar), from the squatted houses of Berlin to the Italian success of the "pro-Soviet philosophy punk" of Cccp-Fedeli alla linea, all the way to this new band alongside Gianni Maroccolo (bass), Giorgio Canali (guitars), Francesco Magnelli (keyboards), and Ginevra di Marco (vocals and backing vocals). There had already been "Ko de mondo" and "In quiete", records marked by a pursuit of musicality and beauty, but here we're dealing with something more than a mere collection of songs: there's an urgency to rally thoughts and friends once again, to raise one's voice and comment on the state of things. The starting point is Sarajevo, a besieged city, where the defeat of a powerless Europe is playing out - a Europe unable to prevent a new genocide from taking place at the very heart of Western civilization, fifty years after the horror of the racial laws.

"Cupe vampe", the opening track, introduces the new Apocalypse through Ferretti's solemn spoken delivery and the relentless backing of an acoustic guitar and a persistent violin, which open up into choral refrains ("eyes lift to the sky/ pyres rise in dark flames") building to the paroxysm of the final indictment: "Life is beautiful inside a basin/ a moving target for every sniper/ life is beautiful in the city of Sarajevo/ this is the fable of cowardice". The burning of the Sarajevo Library, a symbol of culture and centuries of coexistence among different peoples, is placed on the album cover, to slap reality straight in our face.

The specter of folk music, which had already appeared on the last Cccp record ("Epica Etica Etnica Pathos") and on the live album "In quiete" as a sign of the band's openness to the world, returns here quite fittingly to introduce an album about the end of civilization. The singer's voice, cavernous and baritone, immediately shows itself at its most dramatic peak, capable of solemn declamation in the verses as much as of rising up possessed in the melodic openings of the choruses.

As Ferretti's own liner notes state, however, "Linea Gotica" is "a record of electrified guitars", because "this is the sound of our time, however detestable this sound and this time may be". It's time, then, to reclaim another spirit - untamed, an ember beneath the ashen blankets of existence: to resurrect punk, on "Sogni e sintomi", like a slow stripping of the soul from useless ornaments in wartime, limping on its drums, reborn in the guise of a livid, psychedelic ecstasy.

Punk not as a slavish rehash of outdated stylistic tropes or ideologies, but as a form of asceticism of sound, reduced to the ferocity of an electric guitar, because, faced with the unspeakable, any further embellishment would lack both force and decency. The same is demanded of the words: that they say only what is true and necessary, as if wrenched by force from the grip of a silence that the annihilated soul demands. It's the same intransigence with which Cccp titled their debut record "Ortodossia", back in 1984. The musical spectrum, which on the previous two records seemed to expand to explore the most varied possibilities offered by the interplay of atmospheric keyboards, acoustic guitars and noise disturbances, here seems to draw together around a central nucleus, playing in unison as if out of necessity, without losing its richness.

The overlapping of melodic elements onto punk asceticism is what gives this record its strength, finding its center in one instrument that synthesizes the band's two souls: the bass of Gianni Maroccolo. It's his monumental lines - hard and rough as stone, inexorably rhythmic yet melodic at the same time - that form the skeleton of many of these tracks, most of which lack drums.

Elsewhere, as on "Esco", the heart of the sound lies in a dichotomy between lysergic arpeggios and the devastating guitar slashes of Giorgio Canali. Zamboni's contribution, made up of simple yet effective touches, is fundamental even if seemingly understated.

"Linea gotica" is a mature record, one that attacks with harshness but that also knows how, above all, to wrap the listener in a sonic embrace, aware of the need to huddle together when "it's instability that now holds us steady/ amid the daily crumbling". The star of this warm inclusiveness is the female voice of Ginevra di Marco, ready to embrace what her male counterpart is capable of rejecting: hers is the touch that enriches a ballad like "Blu", joining Ferretti's voice in the choral refrain.

"Linea gotica" is also a pictorial record, where the cavernous rumble of the bass seems to open up in the mind the vast spaces, the dizzying darkness of a Gothic cathedral, while the bright tones of the acoustic instruments are like rows of lit candles guiding the eye down the aisles, toward the light of the altar. It's no coincidence that the record's deeper meaning would later be celebrated with a concert in the cathedral of Alba, preserved on the album "La terra. La guerra. Una questione privata".

While the war in Yugoslavia terribly revives the theme of national identities, Csi decide to look back to another conflict and to the identity-forming core of another country: ours.

"Alba was taken by two thousand men on October 10th and lost by two hundred on November 2nd of the year 1944". There's a need for Fenoglio, for his essential and powerful words, "dry, arid splinters fit for fire", dense as the mud that swallowed their boots, hard as the mountain rock on which the partisans fought. Fenoglio, the narrator of the Resistance, the authentic (because poetic) voice that told this chapter of History without rhetoric or ideological trappings, and precisely for that reason still so relevant today. Csi wanted to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Resistance with a record ("Materiale Resistente"), a concert (in Correggio, on April 25, 1995), and a film (by Guido Chiesa) in which they gathered around them part of the Italian independent scene to retell the songs and stories of that era, to keep the memory alive.

The title track of the new album, “Linea gotica”, grows out of this experience, but as Ferretti unwinds his most solemn, earthbound litany, it reveals itself as a genuine map of references the singer seems to cling to in the face of a historical moment of chaos. “Occorre essere attenti/ e scegliersi la parte dietro la Linea Gotica ” is a manifesto of sincere intransigence: just as sharp as the line that once divided Allied-liberated Italy from the territory still under Nazi-Fascist control, so too is the choice of commitment that the reality of the Nineties demands of anyone who “wuol essere padrone di se stesso” — there is no middle ground. But the “piccola patria” that, for the singer, “sa scegliersi la parte” is that same Emilia he has been narrating since his earliest work, so the map of references is also made up of a series of private, sentimental anchors.

"Comandante Diavolo" Germano Nicolini and "the Obedient Monk" Giuseppe Dossetti (to whom the album is dedicated) are symbols of the Resistance in the region, the former from the Communist side, the latter Catholic. They're name-checked in the key track, almost evoking the two complementary souls of the culture Ferretti springs from and which, starting with this album, he seems to cling to in a desperate need to understand his own roots. This is the "private matter" that (again quoting Fenoglio) drives the restless figure of this intellectual on loan to music, drawing on models he himself has cited: alpine military songs and church hymns.

The final part of the album thus delves into the true problematic core of his quest for identity, namely his relationship with spirituality and Catholicism. If organized religions are exposed in their most negative light through the dissection of the Yugoslav conflict in "Cupe Vampe", "Millenni" revisits the theme by embracing the whole of History as if in a nightmare, while "L'ora delle tentazioni" plays out the issue in a private, autobiographical key.

These last two tracks are symptomatic of the eclecticism that now defines the band both musically and atmospherically: "Millenni" is a monumental gothic rock number driven by obsessive bass lines and searing guitar distortion, while the second track builds an intense spoken-word performance over sparse piano notes. This is at once the album's most theatrical and most didactic moment, coloured by sparing guitar interjections until the final opening-up with De Marco's free vocalizing. Yet the sense of thematic, sonic and timbral cohesion is so strong that the listener never feels a break in continuity. Another old CCCP obsession resurfaces here: the idea of the present day as a new Middle Ages. So if "Millenni" seems to conjure the rivers of blood spilled by the Holy Inquisition, the litany "rosa una rosa mistica rosa", whispered in the following track by a Ferretti in sacred rapture, recalls the unresolved knot of medieval culture: the conflict between carnal and spiritual love (see the "Roman de la rose" by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung). In "L'ora delle tentazioni" this painful doubt turns into private torment, as the rigid Catholic upbringing of his childhood is recalled, reaching its climax with "scaldano le braccia del peccato/ scaldano il freddo del firmamento/ ché è fredda la notte, è fredda la notte". These lines sum up the entire atmosphere of the album, which paints a dark, cold world where people seek each other out as if driven by primal needs, by a kind of animal purity.

Hence the meaning behind the cover of Franco Battiato's "E ti vengo a cercare", stripped of its synth-pop lightness and transformed into a solemn monastic procession: it's an appeal to a divinity other than the terrible one invoked by holy wars, a God of love instead. The brief vocal appearance by the singer-songwriter from Catania, a true guardian spirit of a work like this one, is like a warm ray of light filtering through the rose window of a Gothic church, illuminating Ferretti's contrition.

The purity of animals returns instead in the fable of "Io e Tancredi", which evokes a kind of moral apologue: "On the siege front at Sarajevo a small group of Croatian horses requisitioned by the military committed suicide by throwing themselves into a ravine." The tone is that of a stifling litany, almost devoid of melodic openings, bearing witness to the extreme stance of those willing to die for the last remaining ideals of human dignity — so trampled upon that it takes animals to remind us of them. The dark, dense atmosphere, muddy as one of Fenoglio's wartime landscapes, finally clears with the last track. The suspended beauty created by the organ and acoustic timbres in "L'irata" is that of someone dressing for a feast day, knowing full well that "oggi è domenica domani si muore": purity cannot be reaffirmed except as an extreme act.

Who to turn to, for this final assertion of intellectual and personal resistance in the face of a world falling apart, if not the desperate intransigence of Pierpaolo Pasolini? The album closes, then, with the words of the poet of "Ceneri di Gramsci", who was likewise close to that peasant world, to the dignity of those child-warriors that Csi have told us are the roots of our country. The effect achieved here is that of a slow, circular mantra: "...Despite every strenuous decision or vow to the contrary I find myself embarrassed, surprised, wounded by an enraged sense of worsening that I cannot speak of nor question..."

With "Linea Gotica" (and with the success of the following "Tabula rasa elettrificata") Csi proved that combining high and low culture, intellectual commitment and popular appeal, is possible even in Italy — all it takes is having ideas and the courage to voice them out loud. Against such a demonstration of integrity, the individual fates of the band members following the group's split matter very little: these too are, ultimately, a private matter.

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12/04/2009