Picchio Dal Pozzo

Picchio Dal Pozzo are a quartet from Liguria founded by Andrea Beccari, Aldo De Scalzi, Paolo Griguolo and Giorgio Karaghiosoff, steeped in the contexts and motifs of that surreal, impetuous, spontaneous and sinister brand of Italian prog. But Picchio also stand completely apart from any particular scene: theirs is an exemplary, self-sufficient project, fortified within its own musical language.

“At the endless daily rehearsal sessions, everyone brought something from home. A bassline, a guitar riff, a homemade distortion pedal, cymbals (for the drums), biscuits (for tea). One day Karaghiosoff brought in a huge collage, made on the back of a cinema poster, on which he had composed a poem by cutting out words from various magazines. A few eighth-note rests gave instructions for breathing, and at the end of the text there appeared a mysterious figure, dressed in medieval armour with a feather in its helmet, standing by a well. Perhaps going beyond the author's own intentions, everyone present associated that figure with that 'Picchio dal Pozzo' [Woodpecker of the Well], as if it were the noble knight's first and last name.”

Having absorbed sources and grammars from a tender age, with early concerts playing recorder to Orff's music, the odd-metre rhythms rooted in Zappa, and the musical philosophy of Canterbury (Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine, Gong), the young quartet, holed up in the Forte di San Martino and backed by a fine array of Ligurian musicians on loan from other bands, dreamed of losing themselves on the road to Canterbury, in Kent, embarking on a journey fit for barefoot mystics.

Picchio dal Pozzo's geographical coordinates, however “imagined”, were precise, and the paths they traced by their own hand in pencil and pastels conjured up a wandering soul of a fragile, candid, easy-going nature.

A journey along rural paths, through castles and bell towers, hills and rooftops, and Mediterranean shores.

Here his exhausted, intoxicated soul came to rest and lost itself forever.

A gentle, lulling acoustic guitar motif, echoed by xylophone and a voice that seems to rise from the subconscious, almost “material” in texture, gradually reveals in the opening of “Merta” a morning light of unheard-of clarity. In this caress, the enigmatic, multicoloured nature of Picchio Dal Pozzo unfolds. Azure visions rise from wind and string instruments, from synthesizers, from surreal shipwrecked warbling (murmurs, gargles) and explosive percussion.

All this pours out from the keyboards and horn on “Cocomelastico” and above all on the suite “Seppia”, a picaresque epiphany impossible to put into words, a pulsating, carnivalesque Canterbury-style delirium, now ethereal, now impetuous, an Apollonian fantasy turning Dionysian, a raga overflowing with inventive vigour: like the Hatfield & The North albums, it stands as the ideal epilogue to an entire “movement.” “... and the hoopoe slowly woke up”

its song was heard as the sun departed, laid upon the river, while in the dark she flew off into the cold of the Po”.

Picchio Dal Pozzo is this “soft”, fickle mystery with no solution, an ancient legacy, a short-circuited memory. A strange, level/reckless coexistence of structure — now ordered, now chaotic — and of nervous energy and introverted stasis heightens the confusion, revealing and exploring a multifaceted nature, an ironic reality that is both alive and scrupulous.

Semi-transparent, almost dissolved into a gaseous state, spread out and pushed into the atmosphere, this body made of music thickens as it floats, sways, and rolls drowsily, gathering senses and memories in salt, in pollen, in seeds scattered on the ground or carried by the wind. It is reflected in dawns mirrored on the mantle of the sea (“La floricultura di Tschincinnata”, “La Bolla”).

It is music that aids memory, raising images from the instruments, held out like cameras panning across a landscape. A swarm of dazzling outlines made of radio snippets and natural sounds, waves and modulations, evokes places and states of mind that are vivid and identifiable to the listener, absorbed in a kind of communion. “Let's suppose there's a tree with sensitivity, wherever it goes, it will find”.

It is not a journey by land alone, but one pushed out to sea, suspended in the sky. Rocked in the wind by restless instruments, traced and recalled by reined-in vocal filaments and by transitions of “tonal” instruments. “Napier” is a spirit that gradually frees itself from matter and memory to rise, to ascend. On its journey, Picchio Dal Pozzo loses its tracks, loses itself, dissolves into nothing. It abandons the road and the path, staying within itself, in unreal hemispheres, dreaming of the same Wyattian Arcadia found on the covers of “The End Of An Ear” and “Rock Bottom“. It carries itself, and us, back into a strange, dark landscape balance, into visions suggested and marked out by ancient practices (such as the piano and flute that seal “Off”).

This record is a strange, unusual, murky blend, sunk into an imaginary realm. A naturalistic, lenticular fascination, with notes likened to colours; whispered fables and precious melodic fantasies restore, set free, the authentic essence of total music.

“Cover photo taken from an illustration by Heinrich Ellermann Verlag, a Hamburg publishing house specialising in children's books. The bespectacled face is not part of the original drawing: it's Mauro Fiore, cousin of Giorgio Karaghiosoff, famous for his frog impression.”

The quoted excerpts are taken from the group's official website.

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21/06/2007