Decollare verso il mare (“Take off towards the sea”) starts like a simple story of long-distance collaboration and ends up as a small, resonant fragment of recent history. Across three tracks created in September 2022, Dav Cappai - a Sardinian drummer based in Pisa - and Copycat Department’s Alexandr Chiesa - Italian-Russian guitarist and producer working out of Moscow - sketch the outline of a project that was meant to cross borders as easily as files move across a network. The initial idea was linear: begin in Italy, refine and finish in Russia, let the music travel along the same routes as its authors. Instead, the war intervened, abruptly severing the path to the studio and freezing the EP at the stage of draft and intention. What could have been just another neatly completed release is transformed into something more fragile and ambiguous: a document of what remains when circumstances arrest a work mid-flight.
The three pieces carry that tension between momentum and suspension in their very structure. You can hear the imprint of Cappai’s drumming - shaped by Sardinian roots but filtered through the practice spaces and venues of Pisa - as a physical, grounded presence: beats that feel like walking tempo, like departures pencilled into a diary. Around this, Chiesa’s guitar and production bring in a different climate, the tonal colours and atmospheres of Moscow refracted through delay, saturation, and careful layering. The combination suggests movement toward some shared coastline, a common horizon implied by the title, yet the music never resolves into a tidy arrival. Patterns circle, phrases return in slightly altered form, as if the tracks were rehearsing a takeoff sequence that keeps being postponed at the last second.
The interruption of the project becomes part of its meaning. Because the EP was never fully finalized in the studio as planned, what we hear is not a polished endpoint but the exposed process of getting there: sketches with their seams visible, textures that might have been smoothed out left in place, small asymmetries allowed to stand. Over time, these unfinished drafts have shifted from being simply “works in progress” to acting as testimony - sonic snapshots of a historical fracture that continues to shape daily life on personal, artistic, and political levels. The distance between Pisa and Moscow is no longer just geographic; it is charged with blocked routes, reconfigured alliances, and the quiet grief of interrupted dialogue.
In this light, Decollare verso il mare reads less as a minor side project and more as a modest but pointed gesture: proof that even small, intimate collaborations are vulnerable to global shocks, and that those shocks leave audible traces in the music itself. The EP does not offer slogans or explicit commentary; its politics reside in form and circumstance, in the way it preserves a moment when two musicians tried to meet halfway and were forced instead to coexist in a shared, unresolved in-between. To listen is to hear not only the interplay of drums and guitar, but also the contours of a story cut short - the sound of taking off without knowing if, or where, it will be possible to land.
