Amazing stories

According to discogs:

On cold autumn evenings of Milan in 1981 met for the first time Nino La Loggia and Giacomo Spazio. Both were regulars of the Bar Concordia, one of the few meeting places for the post punk generation. Nino with Mark Philopat (now established writer) had given birth to the HCN, one of the pioneering punk bands of the peninsula. Giacomo instead was a performance artist, interested in graphics and was looking for a new form of painting that was innovative and provocative. When the two met sparked. The two had the same passion for music: Kraftwerk, Joy Division, DAF and the whole new scene of proto-electronic wave and together they decided to start the musical project called 2 + 2 = 5, a tribute to Orwellian dystopia. The two split the roles immediately, Nino continued to pursuit the sound to the limit of experimentation and Giacomo wrote texts. The band made their début at the "Cinema-Music Non-Stop" at the Cinema Porpora of Milan in May 1982. Shortly after entered the band Cha Cha Hagiwara, already a keyboard player in 'Jeunesse d'Ivoire', enriching the band's raw sound with sonority which we can now define analog. After several dates among Milan, Turin and Switzerland, the trio entered the studio to record their first LP titled  '... Into The Future' which was to be published towards the end of the year 1983.........and that was the beginning...

Please listen again to their amazing stories... old songs/new versions, recorded in their unexpected 2010 live comeback in Milan!

Do you gesang?

Here we probably got one of the best band from the subterranean italian new wave music scene. This was i'm gonna write about is one of the few notable dark-synth act coming from Italy, more precisely from Milano, more or less 30 years ago. There weren't much infos about the story of band or if they played live alot... but there's been a lot of talking in the recent years about this band and their "coldwave" sound. I remember them playing my hometown Torino in a dark rainy night at The Big Club, but sincerely I was not so impressed by them at the time, they played like millions of others and they sang with very terrible english pronounce... So the question was and still is, do they deserve all this posthumous fame the world of blogging bloggers tribute them? What about other hundreds of bands that never surfaced here in Italy from the beginning to the end of post punk era? Boh, sometimes history changes the facts and what we believe to remember is not what exactly happened... listening once again to their records and their live tapes they do no seem so bad and I must admit I really like them now... anyway, also here in Italy we now have our little "joydivisionesque phenomenon", Weimar Gesang (who?) of course! As I told before, more than three decades have passed since they hardly tried to emerge from the minor cultural rubble of italian's wave to a kind of darkly propulsive post punk anthems. The band consisted of four members: Donato Santarcangeli, Fabio Magistrali, Giuseppe Tonolini, and Paolo Mauri, a few of which went on to play in various other Italian bands over the years. Their base was the historical label and record shop Supporti Fonografici. With their atmospheric soundscapes "a la cure" Weimar Gesang tried to demonstrate a personal kind of glacial grandeur, maybe never seen before here in the land of the sun & spaghetti. It was not easy for them, mainly because their derivative post-punk  sound, in the new born wave italian movement, was not immediately known. But now they had their revenge. In the last years it seems that anyone around the blog involved in coldwave things have a word for them, and many have cited Weimars and their works as "seminal" and influential...they certainly weren't, but now they are, stars...

The keys to the future

David Ball had no doubts that synthesizers have finally arrived in 1979. 

"When electric guitars were first used I'm sure people were saying, 'Do you really think this is gonna last?' Electric guitars have been with us for years now, and I think it will be the same with synths. People have accepted it as a conventional instrument rather than a freak of science.'' "I think synthesizers are here to stay, regardless of what they're playing now. A lot of things I thought were gonna happen a few years ago have happened." England has a basis for synthesizer music. I don't think it's a fad, because it's lasted. Since Gary Numan there's always been synthesizer music in the English charts. It's gone through all the different fashions and it's still there.  "The synthesizer's such a flexible instrument. You can play anything on it. It's not a kind of music; it's a way of making music." Synthesizers now have the potential to become the next classic rock 'n' roll instrument. Keep your ears open. Who knows-in a few years the sequel to this piece may even star you! 

Trouser Press, May 1982

Post-punk before punk!

Over the past 40 years, Franco Falsini, a real italian underground legend, has embraced progressive rock, disco, post-punk, acid house and even psychedelic trance etc. His 70s group Sensations' Fix were (un)considered the Florence's answer to Krautrock but they've been too soon forgotten. At the time, and it was more or less 1973/74, here in Italy we had a lot of Cantautori (some kind of Dylan alias 20 year later...), a bunch of Genesis/Crimson/Santana clones but really no original bands!  Falsini's Italian label Polydor was freaked out by this group of longhairs called Sensation's fix. "They thought we were a bunch of drug addicts to be kept at a distance," he told the It's Psychedelic Baby blog earlier this year. "We were kept out of the studios with the excuse that 'the smoke was hurting the machines'." Falsini lightened a little in the early-80s, producing Electra's frisky aerobics anthem Feels Good (Carrots & Beets) – played by everyone from Horse Meat Disco to Aphex Twin – and knocking out a fantastic album of new wave pop in 1983 as the Antennas (check out Just Your Love). Throughout the next decade he produced hours of mind-expanding acid-trance for his Interactive Test label. Now an excellent compilation focusing on the earlier, more ethereal side of Sensations' Fix, called Music Is Painting In The Air (1974-1977), is released by New York's RVNG Intl, home to recent albums by Julia Holter and Sun Araw. And it's not another derivative progressive album, nothing to do with italian prog, nothing to do with jazz rock and floydesque symphonies. In my opinion, this is  an absolute classic masterpiece of italian wave, a sort of Eno-esque album with millions of influences, from classic rock to pop, from ambient to cosmic music. Sensation's fix music is a unique journey through fluid italian version of krautrock, space-age minimal synth work and yes, post punk before punk were created. Please listen to the fantastic Sensations' Fix last album in seventies (it was 1978's and it was called "Flying tapes") and don't forget to discover them once again in their metaphysical meanderings!

Model Citizens 80-83

Polyrock deserved better, but timing is everything in music. This artsy sextet made intelligent, original, agitated music that threw giddy melodies into the boiling stew of atonal angst and restless rhythm.Strongly influenced by minimalism, the group was produced by the composer Philip Glass and Kurt Munkacsi. They were absolutely great, in my opinion, one of the best new wave post punk band coming from new York in the early eighties. The band, led by singer/guitarist Billy Robertson (formerly of the group Model Citizen), had a keyboard-heavy, pattern-based sound strongly reminiscent of Glass’s work; in fact, Glass performed on their first two albums. Polyrock’s lineup also included vocalist Catherine Oblasney, guitarist Tommy Robertson, drummer Joseph Yannece, keyboard player Lenny Aaron, and Curt Cosentino. The group signed with RCA by 1980, and delivered their debut album that same year. Great music, great feeling. But this seemed to be just the beginning. Another album followed in 1981 and it was a masterpiece: "Changing Hearts" i still one of my favourire album of all the times, full of unforgettable songs like the epic instrumental "Slow Dogs".  Absolutely fascinating in its extremity, Changing Hearts follows the same basic pattern of their debut but it was even better, a journey thru an austere dance music to a taste of straightforward pop. Polyrock was perhaps the greatest band of the early new wave era that didn’t “make it,” and the fact that they never broke through to at least some cult level of success in the early 80s has always been a mystery to me. Listening once again to their last official recordings, the mini "Above the fruited plain", they sound absolutely incredible, a perfect combination of dance-friendly new wave and dissonant, minimal no wave. Here's their 1982 Radio special; the focus is shifted to Billy Robertson, the vocalist and guitar player for the group. He talks a lot about what exactly “new wave” means,including many Polyrock's complete songs. So if you’ve never heard of Polyrock there’s still something here for you to check out if you love new wave, because Polyrock was one hell of a new wave act.