WOEBOT

I'm not exactly certain how I ended up checking out so much Italian Prog this year, and at moments putting together this piece I wondered what the hell I was doing listening to this often difficult music. I suppose I was fascinated with how such an intensely creative, individual music came into ascendence in such a short time-frame (1973 and 1974 if one's being harsh), I also have a missionary desire to redress the disproportionate celebrity Krautrock enjoys in the UK and US but in the process of immersing myself in it I came to really dig it and its nuances.

I wish I knew more about the background to the music, about the "anni di piombo", the Red Brigade, the radicalised campuses, the power of the unions. I suspect that youth made a concerted effort to channel violence in more constructive ways, but I'm afraid (like my German) my Italian is non-existent. I do know from reading interviews with musicians that these years were marked by an incredible degree of cooperation and "healthy competition" between groups. On the other hand with the context melting away, and as a foreigner both in time and geography, one is free to enjoy the music on its own merits. After a good deal of research I cherry-picked these records as being, perhaps, the absolutely best examples of the genre.

Alphataurus: Alphataurus

Alphataurus were either from Genova or Milan. No-one seems to be able to agree. This stunning one-off LP came out in 1973 in a triple gate-fold sleeve. I dig the absurdly portentous imagery but then my taste has been corroded by exposure to all things Prog. Part Black Sabbath with a dash of early King Crimson like a lot of Italian Prog it's probably better to describe it as, get your pen's ready, Symphonic Hard Rock. Amazing crescendos full of bravura, extraneous gamma-ray synths and some of the crispest, most satisfying drum-fills ever committed to tape.

Area: Crac!

A NWW record. Area must be the most typically "Prog" of all the Italian groups, on Crac! they even bought into the classic Prog "egg" motif. That they were theoretically "an international pop group" like wot it says on the cover, with members from Greece, Belgium and France, may have something to do with this. Their self-conscious focus on instrumental prowess (singer Demetrio Statos had a voice which spanned four octaves) and a dalliance with Jazz (later collaborating with Steve Lacy and Paul Lytton) make them appear somewhat like Henry Cow. However, unlike Henry Cow, as well as noodling with the best of them, Area could also write cracking tunes like on this record the insane vampire-funk of "La Mela di Odessa" and "Gioria e rivoluzione".

Balletto Di Bronzo: Ys

Which came up recently in reference to the Joanna Newsom LP of the same name. I first laid ears on BDiB in a double pack of delights which my friend Francesco sent me. The track "Eh eh ah ah" pretty much blew me away. Like a semi-acoustic Slade with floral pretensions there's a mascara'd moonboot stomp to their music which is exquisitely dread, traces as well of Canned Heat's "On the road again" churned into a tremulous fuzz-bass riff. That track isn't actually on this their classic LP. From Naples, "Ys" was released in 1972, my favorite here is the superbly depressed sounding "Introduzione", Gianni Leone having a unplaceably eldritch quality to his desperate vocals. This record is on the famous NWW list.

Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: Darwin!

Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso: Io Sono Nato Libero

The giants of Italo Prog. I prefer the gentler sounds of "Io Sono Nato Libero" their third LP above "Darwin!", particularly "Non Mi Rompete", though all of their first three records are very good. Banco are still together, still touring and releasing records.

Franco Battiato: Sulle corde di Aries

One can half imagine at Progressive rock meets they have heated discussions about which of Battiato's LPs are the most superior. It's probably a toss-up between this from 1973 and Clic (1974) which garnered a reissue on Island records, one of the very few feats of cross-over that Italo Prog achieved. Clic is a little too anti-septic for my now hoary tastes, and I'm suspicious of anything like Bill Bruford, Peter Gabriel or Robert Fripp's work which dons a smart suit, tidies up the synth parts and saunters into the post-punk vanguard pretending it was now trendy.

Like those mass classroom scraps you had when you were a kid, the lame thing to do when the teacher showed up was to tuck your shirt in, loiter at the back pretending you were just examining the poster with the frog-spawn on it, that in no way were you involved in any kind of debacle. The stupid kids on the other hand didn't notice the teacher had come in, might have still been brawling, perhaps one holding a dustbin in his hand. Clic is a little bit too clean and thus, even though ten years ago we might have applauded it for being presciently new-wave, now I sort of despise it for its sleek textures.

My friend, the scholar Jon Dale gets plenty of props from me, so he can field the occasional catty swipe; he loves it! Jon is something of an authority on Battiato, indeed he was the first person to play me any, but in some way I suspect this may in some way be to do with the fact that FB survived the blood-letting that was punk and went on to do records such as "Cafe-Table-Musik", which Dale incidentally loves. Dale veers away from the unacceptable horror that these Italo Prog records represent and indeed some of the stuff he recommended I check out was rather too tasteful for me. Stuff like Prima Materia recordings and the Die Schnatel label. Ah, the meta-critical, nitty-gritty, bitch-fest that is music blogging! Doncha just love it.....

This record is one I'd dearly love to have an original vinyl copy of, I have instead a 1980s reissue of it bundled with Clic- both LPs tonsured to fit- the cover of which I'm too embarrassed to upload here. I saw a copy recently for $250 and baulked. Of these records I only have the Area, the two Banco Mutuo Del Soccorso, the PFM and the Goblin on vinyl. All the rest are CD reissues. You just couldn't afford to buy this stuff otherwise, but it's also fantastic that they are still available.

"Sulle corde di Aries" is a masterpiece and an essential purchase. Franco's singing is almost in the style of a Franciscan monk layered over these harpsichord and hand-drum grooves which are drenched in echo, hand-triggered bass pulses reverberating over freely-plucked mbira. In many ways it follows the original hairy impulse of minimal music as manifested in Terry Riley records like "Persian Surgery Dervishes" but Battiato's feel for melody and harmony is infinitely superior, one finding oneself adrift on these organic, divinely lyrical tracks is as though one was drifting down-river on a makeshift raft encircled by swallows.

Campo Di Marte: Campo Di Marte

This is a pleasantly gentle record of essentially instrumental, folky suites. Bedecked with flute and coloured with Faust-ian bier-keller scat, CdM's never hard-rocking use of electric guitar reminded me of Television in the way it's even-handed, groove-addicted and textural. Another Italo Prog one-off, by the time UA got round to releasing it in 1973, the band had split up.

Goblin: Suspiria

Nastay. Though occasionally lumped in with the rest of the Italian Prog rock of this era, Goblin are a different creature, though with "Roller" and "Il fantastico viaggio del "bagarozzo" Mark" they made a couple of good Prog LPs, they're not regarded as a Prog act in Italy but rather are associated with Dario Argento's films. What's more Goblin are obviously a studio band, their super-slick grotesquely synth-laden sound wouldn't be possible to execute any other way, while the rest of these bands are almost like live-music vehicles who assembled in the studio to transcribe their performance, a classical music trope that's broadly in keeping with their influences. Still "Suspiria" (1977, way outside of our 1973-74 timeframe) is a great record, and if I didn't include it, about the only record in here that's well-known, everyone would bleat at me.

Le Orme: Felona E Serona

Le Orme whose "Uomo di pezza" is also supposed to be very good, enjoyed something of a profile. Unlike many of these one-shot wonders they had a career. Like PFM they flirted with the US/UK rock machine, for instance "Felona E Serona" was translated into english by Peter Hammill and released on Charisma. There's this very fascinating fetish the Italian bands (and indeed practically every European nation apart from Germany) have with Genesis and Van Der Graf Generator. Someone I'm sure will pull me up on this, but I don't think Genesis circa "Tresspass/Foxtrot/Nursery Cryme/Selling England" were that huge a commercial proposition. It was Zep and Floyd who were the real behemoths. Looking at old interviews with them in the NME they appear to be quite like an aggrandised indie band in stature, nothing like your proverbial Arctic Monkeys though. Equally as regards to VDG, realistically how large an audience could there have been for a band like that, one so deliberately obscure? Yet certainly in Italy VDG were absolutely massive, an export on the magnitude of The Beatles. A recent interview I read with Hammill attests to the ferocity of their adoption. Genesis's reputation on the continent seems undinted too. I believe the Italian bands mapped their image of these groups onto their own expectations. Many tried to crack this market, thinking perhaps they were knocking on the gates of filthy lucre, and the story of what happened to these bands, how they succumbed to disillusion is at once pathetic and sobering.

"Felona E Serona" is a lovely contemplative rock record with a moving ecclesiastical bent. The singing, akin to the Battiato is like a canticle, the organ very often haunting and church-ical, the guitars usually acoustic, the bells on Felona too implying a connection to religious music. Again Prog, in the sense that it denotes the obfuscated ornate sound of bands like Henry Cow and Van Der Graf is a misleading classification. There's no getting away from the influence of Classical music on this record, most probably 19th century Romantic music like Puccini, Rossini and Verdi. That's dead Spinal Tap on the one hand, but there's so little here derived from the blues that there's nowhere else these sounds could have originated from. Actually it's the same nationally-determined musical sensibility which makes Krautrock so fascinating.

Metamorfosi: Inferno

I found this suite themed on a trip into Dante's Inferno quite hard work. Not dissimilar at times to Goblin but less slick. A lot of these Italian CDs have been made available via Japan, often in box-xets of mini-LP CDs (never came across this format before-square card cases with CDs in them) and the similarity of this very noir-ish heavy rock to Japanese things like Lost Araaf and Acid Mothers Temple is unmistakable. More than Sabbath, the Italian Symphonic Hard Rock (titters love those words) is the font of that sound.

Museo Rosenbach: Zarathusa

"Zarathusa" is the definitive Italian Prog album. Correspondent Francesco amused me by saying he absolutely hates it, and in many ways it's truly appalling. Portentous, flashy, emotionally over-wrought, the first time you hear it you're struck by Stefao Galifi's ridiculously over-the-top vocals which conjure up package-holiday nightmares of Joe Cocker sound-a-likes fronting bands rocking Italian bars. But given time, and having fully absorbed the context of Italian Symphonic Hard Rock, you find yourself grokking on it. Driving around town with this blaring out of my van I'll confess to feeling like a righteous dude.

Palepoli: Osanna

A furry, long-form freak-out with medieval trappings like Metamorfosi's "Inferno". Terrible flat sound slightly ruins it, even so I reckon Kid Shirt would like this.

Premiata Forneria Marconi: Storia di un minuto

PFM went on to have the largest international profile of all these bands with a brace of records with the most appalling covers imaginable. I think they must have connected with the Italian diaspora. Their early "Storia di un minuto" may be my favorite of all these LPs listed, it's a very lyrical, accessible record with lovely harmonies and melodies, each side put together like a suite. If I told you it reminded me of ELO and Wizzard would that put you off dreadfully? It would. OK.

Quella Vecchia Locanda: Quella Vecchia Locanda

The maxim goes that Germany was filled with bands copying Black Sabbath then Italy was full of bands copying Jethro Tull. Translating as "that old inn", QVL were from Rome and their flute passages apparently give lie to the influence of Jethro Tull upon them. I have a very scratchy copy of Tull's "Aqualung" which I bought for two pounds in the process of researching this piece and I was quite appalled by how conventional it is, like a gruesomely leaden pub-rock band with the most pedestrian third-hand folk flavors. Conversely QVL's "Un Villaggio, un'Illusione" is a masterpiece of prodigious mind-fucking hard-rock with one of thee "ur" churning guitar riffs and fabulous heroic impassioned vocals.

Semiramis: Dedicato A Frazz

Another one-off. Apparently Semiramis were teenagers, a fact which blows my mind given the degree of co-operation necessary to make this music. It's one thing to dole out "Louie Louie"-style 4/4 rawk, quite another to work up a music which ebbs and flows like this, though perhaps I'm being unfair to teenagers? I suppose the Michele Zarrillo's fruity vocals must be a chief attraction, and it looks like he's still got something of a sophisticated, Euro-Pop career going on. To describe the record: plangent acoustic guitar, hard-riffing electric guitar, almost junglistic revolving drum patterns (!), bells and an occasionally off-putting cheap "ballroom" synthesiser.

Tilt: Arti E Mestieri

Thanks to the be-shirted kid for sending this my way via his West Country Progressive alliance. It was on my shortlist, but unavailable to buy. I showed our kid the sleeve which I googled and he quipped: "It's the jazz museli funnel...!" I thought that was very funny. Almost entirely instrumental in a Jean Luc Ponty (here be violins!) and Zappa/Duke fusion-y vein it's not exactly my cup of tea. The drumming is super-human though, birds-wing flurries like Billy Cobham's stuff with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, who would also be an obvious reference point. The synthesiser with the grand piano pre-set a particular low-light, but you have to admire the artistic consistency of this stuff. I think appreciating a sustained palette of sound is probably the key to digging Prog. It often sounds like turd, but if you cut that turd in two and there are no hazlenuts secreted within it, then you've just got to stand back, stroke your chin and admire it.

Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno: Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno

Another NWW record. I never went through that list until recently and was surprised to find how much stuff I recognised in there. Un Biglietto Per L'Inferno is yet another one-off release and it's a super LP, not finicky at all, just righteous rocking grooves assembled fluidly and not with one ear on creating deliberately jarring contrasts (that famous prog cliche). Highly recommended.

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In the course of exploring Italian Prog I found Augusto Croce's excellent Italian Prog site completely invaluable. Also crucial was the peerless Gnosis database. Queerly and synchronously some time in the middle of my investigations I noticed this excellent ilm thread started I believe by the critic Mark Prindle. I came across the dealer Doug Larson through eBay where I made some purchases, and he was very helpful in sorting me out with CDs of this music, and bursting with recommendations.