Le Stelle di Mario Schifano

The Sixties are me.

(Mario Schifano)

If New York had the iconic Andy Warhol with his Factory, Rome had him: Mario Schifano. In the political and social ferment of the Sixties, when for the first time young people became the protagonists par excellence of change, the artistic universe too played its part in upending institutions. For Mario Schifano, art and life were two sides of the same coin. Amid women and excess, the artist of Libyan origins rose to become the maudit prophet of pop-art made in Italy. A larger-than-life figure (even capable of temporarily "stealing" Marianne Faithfull from Mick Jagger, ed.), always resistant to being pinned down, he was among the first to experiment with the blending of different artistic forms: film, photography, music.

These were, in fact, the years of multidisciplinarity (some would call it multimedia practice ante litteram). Artists – from Schifano himself to Gianfranco Baruchello, Luca Maria Patella, and in part also Franco Vaccari – moved within the limbo underlying arte povera (Jannis Kounellis), happening art (Ketty La Rocca), the programmed-kinetic movements (the T group in Milan and the N group in Padua), and Italian-style conceptualism of figures like Giulio Paolini and Michelangelo Pistoletto. What emerged was an absolutely borderline poetics, building often uncontrolled and unpredictable bridges between music, performance, installation and visual art. It's no surprise, then, that he was struck like lightning by the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" staged by the Velvet Underground between 1966 and 1967. This was precisely the casus belli that sent his ambitions soaring, to the point of barging headlong into the little Italy of the beat scene to remake it in his own image, putting together a band meant to rival the one sponsored by Warhol.

In Rome, however, his search for musicians suited to such an experiment came up empty. The real opportunity arrived only when his friend and film producer Ettore Rosboch introduced him to a new band made up of Venetian bassist Giandomenico Crescentini (a former member of Milan's New Dada), Venetian keyboardist Nello Marini, Roman guitarist Urbano Orlandi and drummer Sergio Cerra from Alessandria. Schifano's ambition, but also his egocentrism, is evident right from the name. The paternity of the project is glaringly obvious: while Warhol still limited himself to a producer credit on the cover, tucked just below his own silkscreened banana on "Velvet Underground & Nico", the Roman group carried the artist's name — new dominus et deus — right in its very moniker. As if to say, "more than an independent band, this too is one of my many works." And, almost needless to say, just as with the Warhol-Velvet pairing, Schifano also handled the cover art, affixing — again in the manner of his American colleagues — one of his particularly iconic works, namely the "stars" (which he was painting in the most varied ways during that period, on equally varied supports). The painter's megalomania even carries through into the album's dedications, which name more than one hundred and twenty people: from his parents to his ex-lover Anita Pallenberg, by way of Che Guevara, all the way to Andy Warhol himself.

To get his astral machine moving, Mario Schifano drew on his network of contacts and initially had the band play at the theater on Via Belsiana (run by Alberto Moravia and Dacia Maraini), projecting his film "Anna Carini in agosto vista dalle farfalle" onto a screen in stark contrast with the martial, alienating rhythms played by the musicians. Faced with these happenings, the Roman public was split between great enthusiasm and more than a few indignant stares. It wasn't long before the performances made their way to the "Piper" in Turin, the right city in those years for experimenting in full artistic freedom (so much so that it was in the Piedmontese capital, at the Fono Folk Stereo studio, that they recorded the tracks that would end up on the album's B-side).

Schifano, however, was still not satisfied: being a man of excess, he needed a composition that could become the band's true stylistic manifesto, the perfect soundtrack to subversion. The artist thus equipped the band with a whole retinue of freak artists: avant-garde sculptor and pianist Peter Hartman, visual artist Paul Thek (on tambourine), Ettore Rosboch (on piano), and hippie Francesca Camerana in a cameo. The result is "Le ultime parole di Brandimante, dall'Orlando Furioso" — a title already long enough to scare off the unwary listener — an almost eighteen-minute jam that, as the suggestion goes, is "to be listened to with the TV on, muted." In this way, Schifano and his collaborators tried to give the listener a small portion, a souvenir — a lasting one, nonetheless — of that multimedia quality which, for the Roman artist, lay at the heart of a project that was tacitly extemporaneous, even aleatory in its happening-like nature.

It is thus an anarchic improvisation that wraps around and completely overwhelms side A of the vinyl, a rather unusual thing for the time, considering that Frank Zappa's mad experimentation on "The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet" had only been tacked onto the end of his debut album ("Freak Out", 1966). Just as he had done in painting, where he had "zeroed out" the value of the image through his advertising signs, thereby redefining the very meaning of figurative art, Mario Schifano wanted his band to strip music of any melodic embellishment. Right from the attack, Le Stelle head in the very direction of Zappa's Dadaism. Innovation is present from the very opening: you can hear the musicians settling in before the recording begins, studio chatter that immediately conveys the sheer spontaneity of the project. In truth, the body of the improvisation is already in plain view, amid percussion drenched in reverb, Hartman's playful piano strumming, random shrieks; but at this point a second introduction arrives, an acoustic Renaissance motet that quotes the very passage from Ariosto's "Orlando" referenced in the title.

Everything strains to burst onto the scene, ratcheting up the tension even further: by the third minute the song (with the aforementioned Camerana on vocals) is literally annihilated by the instruments, invading the acoustic spectrum with no order whatsoever, though keyboards and electronic screams dominate, still in close contact with the shuffling percussion — something that voraciously draws on the anarchy of Red Crayola, on certain cyclonic pandemoniums of Sun Ra, on the collective improvisation of Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive", on the freehand deliriums of Hapshash & The Coloured Coat and, certainly, on the more orgiastic rampages of the Velvets ("European Son" and the like). Everything reconfigures itself, at least for a few moments, when Orlandi's guitar enters with an acid-blues call-and-response motif that also seems to anticipate the phrasing of Captain Beefheart's "Moonlight On Vermont" and could easily belong to a Quicksilver Messenger Service suite. But the chaos derails and presses onward. The percussion throbs, hammering out of sync, the electronics seethe with concrete acid, the eardrum-splitting organ seems to spill beyond the audible spectrum, the near-barrelhouse piano lurking in the background clashes and destabilizes once more in a Dadaist sense. Rather than an apotheosis, what is reached is a true harmonic collapse, an endless struggle to grab hold of shreds of undefined sound, continually raising the level of the din and seizing sublime moments of sonic (and psychophysical) dissociation. Amid the wreckage, the battle reaches the brink of catastrophe, trying to cross the final threshold of musical existence: the epic, peremptory affirmation of traditional harmony and, at the same time, its disintegration into barbarous, graceless gestures. There is no resolution. The last feedback shriek rings out like an immense question mark, and the dazed oboe recording that follows is nothing but a cryptic and, of course, aleatory close.

In an Italy obsessed with Sanremo hits, with the canzonetta and — ça va sans dire — with beat music, this lysergic monolith, a stone's throw from avant-garde music, could hardly clash more. It's no coincidence that the second side seems to want to calm the waters with five far more traditional compositions rooted in the song form, where vocals reclaim their role and the addition of some flute parts — played by Antonmario Semolini — softens the sound. Here the resemblance to the Velvet Underground nearly disappears, becoming less faint only in a few estranging ballads like "Molto alto" and "Susan Song". "E dopo", meanwhile, unwinds between the obsessive phrasing of the organ and bursts of fuzz guitar, still remaining within beat-music territory — territory that will nonetheless be brutally turned upside down by the screams and deranged solos of "Intervallo".

The kaleidoscopic raga-rock of "Molto lontano (a colori)" finally seems to open up to new contaminations along the Silk Road, veering off course through the lysergic streets of California. Even this part of the record, despite lacking a shred of the formless genius of "Ultime parole", would prove influential: part of the Italian progressive-folk scene of the years to come (Saint Just, Living Music, Claudio Rocchi) would take off precisely from this lesson, also seizing the chance to iron out its naïve flaws.

"Dedicato a…" was released in November 1967 by the small label Bds in just five hundred copies (the first fifty of which, on red vinyl, now fetch dizzying prices). Several years would pass before Mellow first (1992) and then Akarma (1999) made a reissue available, both hampered by the sonic limitations of transferring the (originally low-quality) tape to CD, and another fifteen years (2015), thanks to a joint venture between Ams and Btf, before a vinyl reissue faithful to the first pressing was finally available. The record was, of course, a flop. As one might expect, Schifano's musical challenge failed to win over the public's taste (though the contemporary psychedelic duo sponsored by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Chetro & Co., would be no closer to winning it either). Mario Schifano was so disappointed by the failure of his venture that he abandoned rock music for good, shortly after the Roman event "Grande angolo, sogni e stelle", held on December 28, 1967 at the "Piper". It was, in any case, a grand exit, a pharaonic son et lumière in which Mario Schifano definitively tore down every barrier between the arts: alongside Le Stelle, singer-songwriter Shawn Philips and artist Gerard Malanga (the man who danced with a whip in front of the Velvets) also performed. The stroboscopic show lasted more than five hours, and simultaneously with the music, footage was projected onto four large screens ranging from Vietnamese guerrillas to Tom Mix westerns and some sequences shot by Schifano himself.

Le Stelle's post-Schifano years fizzled out fast; the parallel with the post-Warhol Velvets simply doesn't hold. There would be, not even remotely, any "White Light/White Heat" of their own. The four musicians limited themselves, half-heartedly at that, to going back to the beat sound that predated their encounter with Schifano, on one final single — "E il mondo va/ Su una strada" (1968) — which erased even the last pale psychedelic echoes of the album's B-side, before vanishing from the musical firmament. Marini was the only member to embark on anything resembling a solo career; after another easy-listening single he joined another short-lived act, Venetian Power (a single LP, "Arid Land", 1971, based on Eliot), and two decades later he also put out a collaborative record ("Artista", 1993), whose authorship, however, should mostly be credited to saxophonist Carlo Ponara.

Was it all down to Schifano alone, then? There's no certain answer. What is beyond doubt, however, is that the project gave rise to a cult following that, especially in recent times, has even crossed national borders (Julian Cope's reassessment in the early days of the web was particularly effective in this regard) and endures to this day. Despite the uneven execution, the extremely limited means, the precarious conditions, and above all the disparity in quality between the first and second halves (though the centerpiece suite taking up an entire side of an LP would go on to become a highly regarded trope of progressive rock to come), Schifano and his collaborators on "Ultime parole" achieved a result that is as indisputable as it is enviable. It is, without question, the highest and most daring psychedelic achievement ever reached on Italian soil (and beyond), in terms of duration, scope and depth of exploration. The few other Italian lysergic artists who have followed over the years, from No Strange to Jennifer Gentle, have barely come close to it. In the 2000s its influence finally intensified, thanks to that whole cluster of artists labeled "Italian Occult Psychedelia", Squadra Omega chief among them, who sought to leave behind the remnants of nostalgic revivalism and rediscover similar paths of free improvisation, going so far as to resume the adventure into territories at the edge of harmonic law. It's a new, miraculous underground upheaval still carrying some trace of multimedia spirit, and thus once again to be traced back to the Roman scene of Le Stelle and Schifano half a century ago. None of these young upstarts, however, has yet shown the same force, the same vibration of indeterminacy, the same reckless passion and all those other components of unrepeatable inspiration capable of dragging and scattering the human ear into sensory indefiniteness. Just like the light — wondrous, blinding, yet also fleeting — of shooting stars.

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05/11/2017