Massimo Volume

The music of Massimo Volume is a journey into the unconscious. Accepting it is an act of courage. Offering it up was their greatness.

Living in Bologna for study reasons, Emidio Clementi (vocals and bass), Egle Sommacal (one of the finest Italian guitarists of the last decade), Vittoria Burattini (drums) and Gabriele Ceci (guitar) recorded this masterpiece of Italian rock during a very particular phase of their lives: little money, overwhelming anguish, and far too many dreams... "I feel like the ceiling of a bombed-out church," says Emidio in "Inverno '85", as the music drills through false modesty. But it's precisely through the distorting lens of pain and loss that Massimo Volume turned Bologna ("their" Bologna) into a metaphor for their whole existence.

On an August morning six years ago, over a steaming coffee, Egle confided to me that the stories Emidio told weren't always autobiographical, but often traced the experiences of friends or "mysterious" figures from Bologna's underground scene... Take Rigoni, for instance, an almost mythical figure. Or Leo, a close friend of Clementi's. Egle also spoke of their influences, which operate on a very deep level within their sound: from Joy Division to the most twilight strains of post-rock; from no-wave to the most evocative math-rock, by way of early Nick Cave (especially the "From Her To Eternity" era). Egle is the band's true musical mastermind. It's his guitar, in fact, that drives their entire sound forward - now cutting, now hazy, capable of both punk explosions and post-rock implosions.

A continuous interplay of, precisely, "opposing" forces; of reverb and harmonic fractures that find their perfect vocal counterpart in Emidio's lyrics. A genuine "dramatization" of the musical event. Something that hardly engages a distracted listener, because it's too tied to a "cathartic" and "redemptive" conception of music. Because, at bottom, it is indeed about salvation. Music as a door left ajar in a dark room. The light filtering through is an omen of redemption, the possibility of vindication. There are no concessions here. Even the so-called "alternative" bands of the Italian scene fade next to these shards of urban life, always led to the edge of the abyss, so that, just a moment before, one might find the strength to notice the wonder of small things. Because this, above all, is what Massimo Volume sing about (house moves, benders, unmade beds, rent to pay, journeys to the end of the night, etc.), but they do it in a unique way: dropping any hypocrisy, any embarrassment, while the music seems to fill the empty spaces left between one line and the next (or else constantly searching for a possible "aesthetic" correspondence between words and music), conjuring a world teeming with life, however futile... however melancholically doomed to vanish, like footprints on the shore of a stormy sea.

In essence, Massimo Volume's is a deeply personal, almost "cinematic" post-rock. The feeling, indeed, is that each of their songs is the soundtrack to an imaginary film, whose screenplay - already fully present in Emidio's lyrics - is further charged with symbols and emotion by a sonic blend as unsettling as it is sensual, yet also capable of sudden neurotic fraying. The instruments' timbres are certainly the cornerstone (as per post-rock convention), but the band is also intent on achieving a particular balance among the various sound sources. What matters, ultimately, is the atmosphere. The "musical set design".

By the time they went into the studio, Egle & co. already had a full-length album behind them, "Stanze" (1993), which, while hinting at genuinely interesting developments, suffered too much from naivety (evident above all in the imperfect execution of the musical structures and in lyrics still too bound to a verbosity born of burning, uncontainable communicative urgency). The refinement (both musical and linguistic) took place over the following two years. Egle moved even closer to the post-rock scene, trying to find his own personal viewpoint, one that also took into account the fundamental lesson of the German masters (the whole lineage running from krautrock to the early-80s Berlin scene, with heavy reference above all to the "psychic" formal dissolution of Einsturzende Neubauten, not forgetting that of England's Throbbing Gristle. Emidio, meanwhile, sought a greater purity of poetic diction. The cornerstones of this literary "introspection" are undoubtedly the French "maudits" of the late nineteenth century, though one shouldn't underestimate the importance of American songwriters like Jim Carroll and French artists like Leo Ferre, capable of rendering with exceptional vividness the unease enveloping "ordinary" everyday life. Over these two years, in short, Massimo Volume brought their extraordinary auteur post-rock to full fruition. "Lungo I Bordi" stands as the highest testament to this artistic journey.

The guitar's repeated chords, the bass's dark rumble (almost a hushed version of the "heavy drone" technique invented by Godflesh), the sly drumming (Slint), the spoken voice echoing the wretched lives of the maudit artists: this is "Il Primo Dio", dedicated to the Bolognese poet Emanuel Carnevali (1897-1942), one of the many homegrown Rimbauds who died chasing the dream of one day being able to say, of vowels, "their latent births"... ("Emanuel/ First god/ Rimbaud/ a prayer/ to things more beautiful than me"). Emidio's voice is finally sure of itself: alive, tormented.

In "Il Tempo Scorre Lungo I Bordi", a toxic cloud hangs over an extremely bleak atmosphere, a symbol of the vanity of everything. Even an explosive digression fails to impose any easy hope, because, sooner or later, "the dust begins". We mentioned "Inverno '85" earlier. We spoke of feeling a certain way. Everything and nothing. A martial rhythm, a murderous dance, a blinding scenario made of ages vanished yet never forgotten. One of the most "sincere" tracks in all of Italian music. Like holding back from smashing everything, despite a slow, constant implosion of sound. Then, a fragment of searing, sudden lyricism, left to its fate amid a minimal whirlwind of guitars, whose very necessity is called into question by the noise-making of its wicked companion ("Frammento 1").

The psychodrama of "La Notte Dell'11 Ottobre", marked by a sinister guitar drone, tells of a metropolis in decay, because our nights, too, are in decay, caught between nightmares and memories that hurt. Left to its fate, the track burns slowly, amid the clatter of cymbals and the dark resonance of the bass, in a paradoxical climate worthy of expressionist tragedy. The nervous stride of "Fuoco Fatuo" sounds like a stripped-down version of Pere Ubu's "modern dance". The voice is submerged beneath the abrasive buzz of the guitars and the terrifying out-of-tune bass ("Leo, is this what we are?" What, in the end?...).

The intro to "Per Farcela" is jazzy yet powerful, frayed by Egle's usual spastic, and at the same time lyrical, guitar work. Tension builds up until it gives rise to an impenetrable pandemonium. Above it all reigns Burattini's technical wisdom and extraordinary percussive sensitivity. Then take "Meglio Di Uno Specchio": a masterpiece of rage and poetry, with few equals in the history of Italian rock. A single, abominable guitar track, inlaid with micro-variations that mark out the emotional highs and the defeats of a cut-rate love affair. Off to the side, the drums seem to pant behind that runaway bullet made of strings and white-hot pick strokes. Then, at 1'55", the violence becomes palpable, with Burattini pounding out the defeat with insane hammer blows, before the sound implodes once more upon itself, going back to rummage through the soul's shortcuts. Alienation is alive and tormented in "Pizza Express", like cold sweat on the skin. It's a tale of ordinary daily life, built entirely on guitar harmonics, jazzy drum flourishes and sudden accelerations. The harmony between narrative (because, in case it wasn't already clear, Emidio doesn't sing, he recites; at most he declaims) and musical set design is even more evident here. Every note, every sound has the task of underscoring the shifts in the story's emotional tension, capable of marking out the boundaries of impalpable imaginary landscapes.

After the very brief lyrical fragment of "Da Qui", come the "synthetic" chords and sonic epilepsy of "Nessun Ricordo" (in an atmosphere of nervous collapse), before "Ravenna" brings down the curtain on a melancholy note. "Ravenna", of course. A drowsy pace, an almost folk guitar, that moment of placid calm, made of distant, far-off horizons. And then those tapes left running in reverse, amid indistinct voices recounting other fragments of other desperate lives. "We tried/ and we believed we could make it/ and we walked/ towards sunsets/ silent/ ones we're ashamed to look at/ and we forgot our/ inadequate/ bodies/ Lost, we laughed".

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02/11/2006