*200 copies limited edition* "Rozzo was born from the encounter between Jacopo Benassi and Untitled Noise (Michele Lombardelli and Luca Scarabelli): artists and musicians who, in different ways, operate between the visual and the sonic, understood as autonomous expressions that develop on parallel levels. Despite their different research and poetics, their sound production is united by a decisive experimentalism and a distant punk matrix, a common need to be in liminal and fluid territory, deliberately outside the mainstream without mediation. Rozzo is much more than a record: it is an artist's project, a maxi single composed of three tracks, published by Tonini Editore only on vinyl in 200 copies and accompanied by a photographic booklet that is an integral part of it. The three tracks - two of which are covers, Venus in furs by Lou Reed and The end by The Doors - are melodic in nature, an unprecedented choice for a tribute to two icons of musical history. The tracks are freely revisited, remodelled to the point of making the original a pure pretext for a new, unadorned, rough rhythmic pattern. The cacophonic flow of the electro-acoustic collage to which Untitled Noise has accustomed us gives way to Benassi's impure and instinctual voice alternating with the chords and reverberations of Lombardelli's guitar.
Voice and guitar proceed in disharmonic alternation: each asserts itself independently, as an entity in its own right, a pure presence in a dialogue that is, in fact, impossible. Scarabelli's sonorities determine the rhythm by striking self-made instruments out of everyday materials, Lombardelli plays a small number of repeated chords, Benassi's voice invades and at times overpowers the sound field by striking the strings of his guitar with a 'dildo' and then smashing it with a Japanese axe. It is a performance: the tracks were recorded during a live performance at the RetroStudio in Fiorenzuola d'Arda, on a sultry day last July.
The spurious melody, primitive and obsessive, repeats the refrains in a delirious affabulation: the words emerge from the noise, almost as if they were reminiscences resurfacing from unconscious depths in a crescendo that transforms the performance into a fragment of Beckettian theatre. Reiterated sounds that do not manage to recompose themselves, except at times, and then disintegrate, returning to the noise. If they were signs, they would be the spontaneous and undisciplined features of a brutalist work that, driven by emotional impulses, overlap and tangle one on top of the other, delineating in their chaotic rhythm. A desperate energy bursts out, entropically overflowing into a fleeting, mostly dissonant harmony, an outcome that is always precarious, harsh and raw in its authenticity.
Rozzo is also a 16-page booklet with b/w photographs by Jacopo Benassi: a cut tree, an overgrown bush, the artists' faces, instruments, moments of the performance." - Rossella Moratto
