* 2025 Stock *Time is a trickster on 5980 - Patto Generazionale, the latest offering from Sokushinbutsu Project. Massimo ODRZ Mascheroni and Enrico Ponzoni transmute the shimmer of late-’70s and early-’80s dance-floor forms into a suite of revisions, exquisite in their brevity and sly in their intent. Subtly retooling classic tunes like “Oh! Carol” and “Passion Flower,” the pair do not simply trade in retromania; they stage a negotiation with memory itself, unspooling Italo-gloss nostalgia as its synthetic surfaces fray and mutate. Across its scant 32 minutes, every detail feels combustible. Drum boxes stutter, haunted synths spiral, and the faintest hint of live instrumentation slips under the surface, hinting at jazz, library music, and beyond. The effect is one of teasing unreliability: familiar melodies flicker before being overtaken by enigmatic pulses and echo-drenched voices. The album’s true engine, though, is a wry sense of commentary - a questioning of what, precisely, is passed down from one generation to the next, and whether pop itself has ever been more than a ritual of fading signals.
What holds 5980 - Patto Generazionale together is its constant refusal of easy homage. Where nostalgia often flatters the listener, here it’s unsettled - slightly skewed, forever provisional. There is grace in the imperfection: lo-fi tape crackle, songs fading at odd intervals, moments where a groove takes hold just long enough to slip out of grasp. Beneath the playful artifice lies a quiet ache for connection and a mischievous warning about repetition - how cycles renew and exhaust themselves almost in the same gesture. The result is at once effervescent and haunted, a brief but vivid transmission from a future that never quite resolves. With 5980 - Patto Generazionale, Sokushinbutsu Project builds a miniature world of loss, inheritance, and sly celebration - a reminder that even vanished eras can be reanimated, if only for the duration of a perfectly unstable refrain.
