Juri Camisasca

Camisasca is essentially a simple soul who suddenly found himself having to reckon with the sheer stupid ferocity of reality and his own powerlessness to change anything about it. That's why, refusing to remain passive in the face of this state of affairs, he tries to fight in the only way he knows to awaken the conscience of anyone willing to listen, without ever climbing onto a pedestal, throwing in the face of 'packaged' man his manifold exasperated realities and his smoky masks, with his bitter, aggressive voice and his sometimes almost brutal visions-experiences, never detached from the concrete world.

(Giancarlo Piccirilli, "Supersound", June 10, 1974)

Roberto "Juri" Camisasca is just a twenty-two-year-old bricklayer when he records his debut "La finestra dentro", a collection of songs able to tint folk elements with acid-prog hues and hallucinated stories, painting a disquieting yet, at the same time, extremely evocative landscape. I like to picture Juri from that period as Caspar David Friedrich's lone wanderer: motionless on a rocky outcrop, his gaze turned toward that sea of fog threatening to swallow even his own figure; with the unknown ahead and society behind him, the wanderer can find shelter only in the terrifying, sublime panorama of his own thoughts, which he contemplates with his inner eye. On this journey, however, Camisasca is not alone: he's helped by Franco Battiato, who quickly becomes a great friend and a sort of musical godfather.

Besides the sound of his synthesizer (the famous VCS3), Battiato brings along a cast of real substance: Aktuala percussionist Lino "Capra" Vaccina, Maurizio Petrò and Mario Ellepi on guitar, Gianni Mocchetti on bass, Gianfranco D'Adda on drums, Marco Ravasio on cello and producer Pino Massara on keyboards. Precisely because of this large cast of guests from different backgrounds, "La finestra dentro" is not a progressive album in the purist sense, but rather a solipsistic, transcendental projection of one. While the rest of the Italian progressive scene of the time was weaving lavish, baroque tapestries, Camisasca's archaic sounds hark back to the East and the golden mosaics of Byzantium. And if his controversial lyrics likewise ooze the "male di vivere" (the malaise of living) found in our own Jumbo, Biglietto per l'Inferno or Mauro Pelosi, from a strictly musical standpoint some parallels can only be found in experimental singer-songwriters like Tim Buckley, Claudio Rocchi and Alan Sorrenti.

But let's start from the beginning. Milan-born Juri Camisasca meets Franco Battiato in 1974 during his military service and, after an audition for Natale Massara's Bla Bla label, is given free rein to record his first LP, though he will later candidly admit: "At the time of my debut album, my ideas were a bit confused; some things were mere effects, though I think I was also unconsciously expressing a certain existential unease". One can only agree: Camisasca's world is indeed painted in bold colors, his murky vocals constantly smothered by discordant melodies, dense with percussion and electronic touches, describing the turbulence of an inner journey toward asceticism.

Juri's aim is to free himself from material cravings in search of the spiritual, starting precisely with the hidden anguish of a man at war with the impulses of his own body: this is the case with "Un galantuomo", which manages to conjure an empathetically desperate atmosphere, thanks above all to Camisasca's voice-as-instrument. As he himself would confess in the booklet of the 1991 CD reissue, in the opening track the visionary singer-songwriter paints his malaise of that time, giving it a rather peculiar connotation: "In my body there are sewers and everyone calls them veins/ but inside there are rats running around". This form of neurosis feeds into the protagonist's self-harm, as he finds himself forced to beat himself with a hammer so that those negative thoughts – represented by the rats – come out through his nose and ears.

Further on, the galantuomo looks beyond his own Self, glimpsing a social and political situation no less desperate: the paroxysmal ballad "Ho un grande vuoto nella testa" is driven by piano, which pleasantly contrasts with Camisasca's raw vocal attack ("I put all my thoughts in a glass and then poured them into the river of illusions/ and now I'm looking for something I don't know/ but maybe it's because I'm afraid to face reality").

With "Metamorfosi" the album then returns to its folk roots, amid ethnic percussion, docile guitars and a placid synthesizer, a setting still at odds with the monstrous discovery upon waking. These Kafkaesque images of the man-insect are not to be taken literally, though: they allude to the possibility of finding oneself changed with the passing of days, so different as to become an object of discrimination.

Unlike Kafka's tale, the insect eventually breaks free and flies away: this joy, however, is short-lived, as it finds itself thirsty in a waterless desert. Yet the journey doesn't end there, since Camisasca takes us to an even more frightening place: with astonishing dialectical skill, "Scavando col badile" overturns the slave-master relationship between man and animals, always seen from a subaltern perspective. Juri tells us of a world that works in reverse, like "Alice in Wonderland", except that in practice it more closely recalls Orwellian dystopias or Gulliver's allegorical-satirical travels; so, for instance, we find crocodiles using women's skin to make handbags, pigs mincing our flesh to make sausages, or a snake that plays the flute and hypnotizes a man.

Juri descends underground, gets his hands dirty and once again places himself in a dangerous position, forcing us to ask ourselves certain questions about the soul; an even more striking example of this intent is given by the martyrdom of the cross-dressing friend "John" who, through an autobiographical account emphasized by synth, invites the listener to reflect on the theme of homosexuality at a time in history when it was regarded as akin to a disease. Afterwards, precisely from these harsh considerations, a glimmer of hope emerges with "Un fiume di luce", where the sound of organ and voice pours out the first ray of light onto a flat, pathologized life.

Having opened Pandora's box, the quest can then be said to reach fulfilment with the approach to the divine: the locus amoenus of "Il regno dell'Eden" is born and grows by photosynthesis precisely from the luminous glimmer of the previous track, and could well be the best prototype of Camisasca's music, since it perfectly sums up everything this album has to offer, wriggling between folkloric moments and more experimental passages, right up to the final parousia: "I am the Creator/ and I remain seated on the main throne". For an album that begins under the sign of rats, it's a decidedly unexpected epilogue: it is the beautiful triumph of free will but – paradoxically – also of the hard-won acceptance of God's design; it is the definitive opening of our "window within" onto the divine essence of life: the latter, in fact, already lies within ourselves, to paraphrase a splendid line from Saint Augustine's "Confessions", so dear to Camisasca ("Tu you were inside me, and I was outside. E là ti cercavo").

The overall result of "La finestra dentro" is far more energetic and intense than Claudio Rocchi's "Volo magico n. 1" and, above all, than Alan Sorrenti's "Aria", perhaps the only Italian artist of those years equally capable of using his voice as an instrument; the difference is that while the future "figlio delle stelle" was able to sublimate the psychedelic dreams of the era in an ethereal way, Juri's vision is instead stained by the innate nightmares that every man carries with him like an invisible but heavy burden. The existential unease running through the record indeed reflects that of its author, who, after some collaborations, a couple of singles ("La musica muore" and "Himalaya", 1975) and a stint in the Telaio Magnetico supergroup, at the end of the decade took holy vows and retired to a Benedictine monastery. He would emerge eleven years later in search of something even more extreme, becoming a hermit on the slopes of Mount Etna. Around the same time, Juri's artistic career resumed with greater consistency, still divided today between painting and music, always under the sign of a unique spirituality: this is how the solitary wanderer finally found his way home, far from the mists of this bleak contemporary world.

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23/04/2017