MATERIALI MUSICALI presents:
STURM BAND: AUTUNNA ET SA ROSE feat. STEVEN BROWN TITLE: STURM CATALOGUE NO.: MM02 LABEL: MATERIALI MUSICALI DISTRIBUTORS: E.N.D.E., AUDIOGLOBE TIME: 65’13” This brand-new work by A&SR, the third of its adventure through music, appears more daring and variegated than the previous ones, with its architectonics full of philosophical and historical references to the period between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, and even strictly connected to some scientific cosmological topics, following in the wake of the mourned Austrian painter and architect Hundertwasser and of his great intuitions. Starting from the “geometrical-musical experiment” tried with Leben-Tod, cover-track of an original song by the Slovene band Laibach, contained at the end of the Sturm CD as a ghost-track, here coupled to Spiralemusik - that represents the first and exclusive example of a sound representation of the 3-D spiral house (the main figure in his painting, and, in a more complete view, the centre of the ecological idea of the Austrian genius) - this music-theatre project was created as a theatrical work in which the leading role is played by the musical compositions that are mixed in a special way with the scenes, with the result to create an important effect in the telling of the story of the character Sturm, a young man with an ancestral romantic and tempestuous personality, a symbol of the cultural Middle-European ferment in the years of the Austrian empire, in the period even called Felix Austria, that’s before the Great War. His name is also connected to the famous avant-garde art journal Der Sturm, founded in Berlin in 1910, and for which Oskar Kokoschka made a fantastic self-portrait cover: he painted his face as a skinhead prisoner serving a life sentence, running a finger into a wound on his chest, with very black-ringed eyes as full of scars and a grotesque mouth expression as to represent the protest against the social world of the “successful grown men”. Of course, this suggests a hard complaint to the Austrian society of that period, that Kokoschka considered as a sham world, hidden behind masks of appearance: therefore, the character Sturm, as already Kokoschka in his self-portrait, shows himself as the prophet and the martyr who expiates the guilt of a dull society, unable to see his sensitiveness, and only attended to a “plastic” material self-fulfilment, exactly - in quite an unforced parallel! - as our modern third-millennium society is. The
starting scene introduces S. in a special moment of his life, as he has
finally become conscious of his unavoidable parting from the hypocrite
world that has been often emarginated him. This is possible through his
inner search for a special link of complicity with Art, in the attempt to
express himself in a “true” manner; this situation leads S. to find
out Love for Lybra,
a female character who looks at once very insecure and full of
psychological complexes, even if exquisitely sensitive at all, but who can
hardly appreciate the true feeling she’s moved by. That’s
why, in spite of their strongly emotional fervour, their love is destined
to an early failure, in such a strange sequence of events, so that S.
feels suddenly homeless and lost, quite defenceless (and he feels a sense
of Unheimliches,
term used by Freud
in his studies about personality), and then he’s definitively abandoned
by Lybra. Many paranoiac nightmares now overwhelm him, so that he almost
loses control and takes the risk to get out of his mind in a dangerous
extreme way. However, in a paradoxical situation indeed, the sleep - with
his dream experience - becomes his natural shelter, often achieved
artificially, by self-stimulation and by some hypnosis practices: in this
state S. can solve the duality between dream and reality, now getting
conscious of their coherent linking, either connected to Freud’s
theories of dream interpretations or to Antonin
Artaud’s surrealist writings about this altered state of conscience
in which the man can get into a special touch with death, getting even to
“live”
it every night. The
final scene leads S. to an abstract dimension in which our protagonist
will be able to get beyond the barriers between life on this earth and
eternal Life: an angel comes and leads him into cosmic
spirals, the way to reach the universal
Energy. The last track of this work symbolizes the final synthesis of
Life and Death, just like the contemporary Austrian painter and architect Hundertwasser
(1928-2000) had been representing in his works by means of his spirals;
even some numerological meanings are linked to 5
(the Sturm - and Lybra - letters) and 12
(the number of the episodes of this work), so this ending connects past,
present and future together in an eternal structure wandering in the
space-time continuum.
This CD is enriched by the collaboration of several musicians the very clever cellist Simone Montanari and violinist Gianluigi Cavallari, the sweet singing by Evelina Bosi and the very strong involvement of Gianluca Lo Presti’s noisy guitars, a musician still working with his project Sun & Rain with Blaine L. Reininger but in particular by the special participation of the charismatic leader from Tuxedomoon, Steven Brown, here playing alto and soprano saxophones, clarinet, and giving his new great vocal interpretation in a cover-version of an old track of his, Some Guys, the track that Wim Wenders decided to include in the soundtrack of one of his masterpieces, The Sky Above Berlin (1987), and now played in an orchestral rearranged form. Once again you can admire a refined artwork, both in a pure esthetical sense, and especially for the great variety of symbolic meanings the images suggest, from the cover painting, essential but very expressive, to the soft pictures contained in the booklet, recalling the great times in the old magic Vienna, and even melting to the notes to strengthen melancholy, all the inner suffering and the final sense of abandon of the protagonist. Moreover, the CD contains a ROM-track concerning all the cultural sources connected to this work. Sturm represents the synthesis between the individual essence of the characters of Sous la robe bleue and the universal theme of Né l’être… éternel, in view of the fact that the protagonist is moved by his instinct and rage, and in the end he melts with the primitive matter of the Universe, in a process of pure sublimation... Constantly searching for pure Beauty, joining his Spirit with the supreme forces of Nature, pursuing the ideal of Cosmic Love. booklet text doc file 50K
Also available from AUTUNNA ET SA ROSE: Sous la robe bleue CD Aut001 |
