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The project Autunna et sa Rose is active since 1994 within the European circle as a contemporary laboratory of many-sided ideas of expression, and it made its first appearance in the musical set in 1996 with the issue of the debut CD-album titled Sous la robe bleue. In fact, though it was decided with a strong passion for a musical way of expression, the sources contributing to found this project have got quite a more various and composite nature, beginning from those of a marked literary sort: the origin of the first above-named work is to be found in the writings (several compositions of "veiled-autobiographical" kind) produced before the birth of the project, and that could inspire its creation very naturally in the attempt to give the most suggestive completion to words for communicating emotions in a multi-sensorial way.
It's a terrible fear that constrains us to scream our wish of Love and Life: everything's born and has been taking shape after getting conscious of the so-called "distance between being and appearing", that we've been trying to point out as a fetid plague in this world of "perfect men", where too many emotions are hidden and masked to take refuge in mean "plastic" mechanisms of the quality of unconditional appearing; but the absence of emotions, more or less forced, apart from leading to a sham life, can even lead to insanity (maybe the opposite extreme…). So you can see well the reason of the two above-emphasized capital letters: there's a strong need of expression, and this must be pursued by not accepting any hypocritical half-measures and especially not placing our trust in some temporary trends just to gain an increasing (in a hypothetical measure, anyway) audience.
From the beginning, Autunna et sa Rose was intended to be a mainly acoustic band of contemporary genre, whose distinctiveness has been interpolating notes with acting and poetical recitations, always been fundamental to place the live performance in an atmosphere with no intention of offering an abstract musical connotation. That’s why the planning of this show was focused on the central role of acting, considered from a more specifically theatrical view, where the weight of soliloquies and of gesture, mixed with dynamical movements on stage were devised to get the upper hand over everything else and so take the audience to a breeze drifting from the former context. Nowadays, even the use of videos has strengthened the emotional and magnetically involving impact of the performances, giving the audience a more complete view about the creative universe the ensemble has always tried to communicate: in a single word, the search for the ideal of Gesamtkunstwerk (the “total” work of art).
The second work by A&SR, titled Né l'être… éternel was released in 2000 and it is structured as a sort of pièce inside which there are some interfering musical parts describing the atmospheres and the events told in four tales, that's the four movements of the Eternel-Symphony, acting as a soundtrack in the forthcoming performance to be put on stage with the support of a theatre company. The theme of the spirit’s eternity generating energy, of death as an essential part of life and the search for a symbiotic relationship with a Nature modern human beings have a great need to be reconciled with divides in two distinct halves. The first one comprises 4 chamber music pieces while the second one consists of 4 orchestral pieces. Actually the number 4 represents Nature and the elements that form it. Overvaluing and inner searching for irrationality, the "truth" of dream and the consequent justified immersion into atmospheres of oneiric contemplation, that are lived as some first states of hallucinated sensitiveness during which death give signs of a deep expression, are conceptual cornerstones Autunna et sa Rose ties itself constantly to, and, not casually, quite on them the spiritual leitmotiv for Eternel is based: the reference is made to the idea of a kind of "millenary" death, a death that is seen, like ancient peoples were used to do, as a part of life, this very life that is "guided" by the dream, where you can feel the souls and meeting angels can be reality… Moreover, Nature can make us live and see, refracted within our inner world, some unexpected specular reflections: the bridge of the presumed crossing from one state to another, if seen – in an oneiric condition – reflected onto two orthogonal planes, can show us the vision of infinity, of the symbol of continuousness, soaked in a both comfortable and unchangeable eternal nature.
In July 2005 was finally out Odos eis ouranon, double split-CD recorded live with Ataraxia and issued by the Portuguese label Equlibrium Music. The distinctive feature of this live performance of the ensemble was the ability in expressing all that in fact they strongly needed to. It wasn’t the first show performed by the band in a church, but it was the first one with the relevant contribution of the excellent soprano Sonia Visentin, renowned interpreter of contemporary music all over Europe.
About the presence of an invisible "umbilical cord" of inspiration that links the project to some contemporary artistic movements as surrealism and futurism, there are several repeated witnesses in the homage's to Antonin Artaud, quoted and performed in one of his minor - but not for this less representative of his genius - works, L'Art et la Mort, a collection of various writings, published in 1929, at the height of the surrealist period: the homonymous work was issued by Ark Records in May 2006. This is a collection of tracks by artists of a recent past, most of them related to the wave-gothic/industrial genre. Even if already brought to success in the past, they have been now skilfully revised and somehow adjusted: in conformity with a certain contemporary sensibility, the present compositions are the result of an interpretation based upon some unexpected literary reverberations, which, in our opinion, even the original songs could have had since their birth. Therefore, by following a sort of de-structurating process, typical of cubist artists, like in a Braque’s picture the original tracks have been reduced to puzzle pieces and then further shredded, contaminated and totally tattered, each time according to different parameters, depending on the various occurring needs: finally, the puzzle pieces have been reassembled often in such an amazing way that it seems they got a brand-new life (only apparently independent from that generating cell). Beside the above-explained concept, which strictly concerns music composition, also the set of literary sources which the whole work refers to is basically important in order to trace out a spiritual path aiming to stimulate our personal research on the quintessence of death, soul and eternal life, and once again relating to Antonin Artaud, considered as the sublime prophet.
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