FABRIZIO TESTA - Diario notturno

After putting The Long Goodbye on hold, Fabrizio Testa returns to his solo project. With “Diario notturno” he looks beyond the boundaries of “Return to the sacred” and opens up a new path in his discography. It's one of those records meant to be listened to and read at the same time: a spoken word piece set against shifting experimental backdrops, from which emerge prophetic words inspired by some of the books Testa has published in recent years, above all “Diario notturno di un guardiano di camping” and “Distretto Adriatico”. Testa's poetics, and therefore also those of The Long Goodbye, remain largely unchanged; what changes is the medium that serves as the backdrop to the places where the protagonists of the Romagna coast find themselves, alone with their disconnected thoughts.

In "Diario notturno" the Romagna coastline loses its seaside colors and becomes a metaphysical landscape where campsites, bars and beaches turn into places where the same gestures repeat in infinite loops, in a kind of impoverished liturgy. With his usual long list of collaborators (Luca Barachetti, Massimo Pupillo of Zu, Martin Mayes, Mario Arcari, Walter Prati and Luca Gusella), Testa conjures up dissociated thoughts that seem tossed off to be quickly forgotten, streams of consciousness with no connecting thread that might occasionally contain some essential phrase, yet remain destined for oblivion all the same.

The camping ground caretaker, the protagonist of one of his books, and the other regulars along the coast cross paths and glance at one another, yet remain forever profoundly alone, pondering a reality that cannot be understood. They are all nameless figures (a German girl, a man with a heart condition, a sweaty Black man playing jazz, a friar, etc.) like ghosts wandering and thinking, carrying out pointless actions within this riviera/universe, with no chance of altering their fate.
The quotes from Bergman (“Questa è l'ora del lupo”), the reflections on time's relentless advance (“Il tempo rovina lo smalto sui cancelli”), Yiddish proverbs about apocalyptic trumpets and gothic scenarios (“Una ragazza tedesca completamente nuda sosta accanto ad una tomba”), and religion endlessly sought but never truly found, are all just images that follow one another like a series of photographs flicked through in a hurry.

The sonic approach also shifts from track to track. "Gesù dietro la siepe" evokes the call and response of American slave work songs. On "Ortodossia Ok", Massimo Pupillo's alienating percussion and synths accompany the wait for “a modern apocalypse” amid scenes of decay and abandonment. "Calce sul volto" weaves a repetitive bassline together with the sounds of Luca Barachetti's wheelbarrow, while on "Nel respiro del tempo" a decidedly avant-garde cello moves over cryptic lyrics. But it's "Colmare l'abisso" that delivers the album's most immediate atmosphere: an apocalyptic scenario, black as a solitary night in a deserted campground.

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27/09/2026