Giardini di Miro'

At the historic turn of the millennium, “Rise And Fall Of Academic Drifting” captured a unique, unrepeatable moment for the Italian scene, as it broke away from the tradition of the Eighties and Nineties to dive into something new, something different. The “full-length” debut of Giardini di Mirò is not merely the unrivalled monument of Italian post-rock. It is also, unwittingly, one of the records that kicked off an entirely new scene, the one we now call indie, which perhaps for the very first time dared to look beyond Italy's narrow borders, favouring dialogue with foreign audiences and artists instead. It is also the meeting point with another thrilling, parallel saga: that of Homesleep, the Bologna label that throughout the 2000s would set the coordinates of the Italian underground sound. Along the 80 kilometres of Via Emilia connecting Cavriago to Bologna lies the snapshot of a historic moment well worth fixing in place, once and for all.

Formed in 1994 in the “pro-Soviet” town of Cavriago (Reggio Emilia) at the initiative of Corrado Nuccini and Giuseppe Camuncoli, at the time literature students in Bologna, Giardini di Mirò started out as just one of the many young rock bands springing up on Emilian soil and looking to the Italian scene as a reference point - first and foremost the likes of Csi and Massimo Volume, who were likewise based along Via Emilia. By the end of the decade already, with the gradual arrival of Jukka Reverberi, Lorenzo Lanzi, Mirko Venturelli, Luca di Mira and Emanuele Reverberi, the Reggio Emilia outfit began to change its skin. Helped along by a handful of concerts in Germany organised by the provincial Arci association (Cavriago is twinned with the town of Mühlacker, in Baden-Württemberg), Giardini di Mirò started thinking in terms of a sound with international scope, and indeed found greater recognition abroad than at home. Jukka Reverberi recalls those days: “We lived out in the provinces, and there was nothing like this around here - in fact, whenever we entered local competitions we always came second or third. We never won a single one. The golden boys always won.”

The turning point came with post-rock. Giardini di Mirò, pushed above all by Jukka, began writing instrumental tracks in which vocals became somehow superfluous. Camuncoli, who was on vocals at the time, accepted the way things were going and left the project, soon after becoming a top-tier comic book artist. Meanwhile, the band honed its style. “On our part,” says Reverberi, “there was always a strong focus on song structure. Whether tracks ended up sung or instrumental was a decision made afterwards: we always dealt with the music first. For us that was the main part - not so much writing the song, but building a track with a substantial arrangement, a substantial structure, to which vocals could then be added.”

As it happens, the band that showed the way for the Reggio Emilia group wasn't a strictly post-rock act, but rather Sonic Youth with "Anagrama", their entirely instrumental EP from 1997. "I know, it's strange, but that's how it is. If you also think about a track like 'Mildred Pierce', off 'Goo', there's a whole instrumental section there. That's where we decided what we wanted to do. Sure, bands like Slint and Massimo Volume mattered too, as would Mogwai later on, but only afterwards".

It's no coincidence that Giardini di Mirò's first two EPs came out on American and German labels. Between 1998 and 1999 the band entered the Gammapop circle, which effectively paved the way for their arrival at Homesleep, and opened for Godspeed You! Black Emperor at a surreal Italian date in Pergine Valsugana, in the province of Trento, where the gear took up almost the entire venue and the audience was forced to watch the show from the windows. It was during that period that Homesleep, on the lookout for bands to launch, decided to sign GdM, more or less around the same time as Yuppie Flu, whose frontman Matteo Agostinelli was among the label's founders.

Homesleep also included Giacomo Fiorenza, who in the summer of 2000 hosted the band from Reggio Emilia at his studio in Florence for the recording of "Rise And Fall Of Academic Drifting", their debut full-length, recorded in June in a twelve-day tour de force. When Homesleep asked the group to record an album for release shortly after (it came out in 2001), Giardini di Mirò only had a handful of songs ready. The rest of the material was written and finalized between late winter and early spring 2000 in a ramshackle country house in the province of Reggio Emilia — much like the Cccp had done in 1990 for their farewell record "Etica, epica, etnica, pathos", immortalized by Luigi Ghirri in the Emilian countryside — abandoning the rehearsal room run by the Cavriago municipality, which had been the local bands' meeting point, for a place where they could play without time restrictions.

"Rise And Fall Of Academic Drifting" is emblematic of the band's unique ability to craft tracks that are not just evocative but narrative, structuring each song through multiple passages that act as turning points in a short story, thereby redrawing a personal song-form that would carry through their later records. Few album openers are as intense and effective as the 6'28" of "A New Start", the quintessence of the band's compositional and arrangement style, on an album whose lineup also features Fender Rhodes, trumpet, clarinet and strings. Guitars and bass build the track passage by passage, generating solid melodies that intertwine and converge into a gorgeous "verse" driven by the rhythm section and trumpet. And something rather uncommon in post-rock of that era happens: there's a sense of surprise made of unexpected turns that already recall the writing approach of bands like American Football and Mogwai.

In the following "Pet Life Saver", it's Agostinelli's voice that defines the track right from the first notes: "Down the old streets in the backyards/ I've gathered some fame/ pet life saver, I am". The heavy, inexorable closing section, where the atmospheres of Rachel's resurface, is entrusted to the strings, framing one of the most intense endings in Giardini di Mirò's whole output. Sirio Zuelli directed the video — winner of the 2001 MEI Independent Videoclip Award — starring Emidio Clementi walking through the streets of Bologna, in real footage contaminated by animation.

In the quiet post-rock of "Beauty Tape Rider" the vocoder makes its appearance, while "Tromsø Is OK" is taut as a wire, with that slanted guitar movement that, in its final section, ritually explodes into Reverberi's electric guitar.

The minimal opening section of "Pearl Harbour", where the guitar, punctuated also by the silence of its pauses, converses with the strings, second guitar and drums, opens through a bridge into a second section that is maximal, intense, distorted. "Little Victories" picks back up the mild, melancholy mood of "Pet Life Saver", this time featuring Paul Anderson of Tram on vocals:

Find a way to leave unscathed

Taking nothing but half baked ideas

Little victories are all I claim

My regard was not enough for you

Miles away from where I want to be

It's precisely that trumpet sound opening "Penguin Serenade" that evokes Mike Kinsella's band, weaving those suspended, melancholy phrasings echoing from Illinois into the dramaturgy of the Cavriago band, also built from e-bow and violins, not unfamiliar with the sounds of Ennio Morricone. Electronics and broken rhythmic figures instead define the closing title track, wrapping up these sonic spirals with its nearly ten minutes and almost foreshadowing the musical developments of the following album. The track has an open form and soft textures, familiar at the time to ensembles like Sharks Keep Moving. After the first section, a smooth slide phrasing built over an organ bed sketches an Americana-tinged landscape, flowing into an emotional finale with dream-pop echoes and a final cadence marked by violin and electronic returns.

"Rise And Fall Of Academic Drifting", along with the shows that brought the album to the stage, strongly influenced the musicians who were forming bands in Italy in those years. The Emilian band's international push, placing them within a European scene alongside acts from Morr Music, Temporary Residence Ltd and Constellation, was also crucial for the emerging Italian scene.

A decisive boost to the album's success also came from a TV appearance on Mtv Supersonic: in the thirteen minutes given to them by the channel, Giardini di Mirò played two songs — "Pet Life Saver" and "A New Start" — one of which ran nine minutes long. Something almost unthinkable by today's standards.

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21/06/2020