Our biggest thnx to Roy (thnx for the translation too!), Christian & all Nonpop Staff
English translation
"A poetic meditation upon the fate of the West, Italy, Blood, Passion and Faith... Monumental!... While some of us are still burning with ardour, left by IANVA’s orgiastic adaptation of the Fiume myth, this serious Italian project is prepared again for new voyages on unquiet waters. This time the journey pervades a meta-historical level and traverses bitter turmoil and fateful thunderstorms. The four songs to be found on „L’Occidente“ draw attention to the yet to come second opus subliming the scale of the passion and tragedy of "Disobbedisco!" and replacing the fortune of the two characters (Maggiore Renzi and Elettra Stavros) by that one of a whole culture. Its cover image seems much like a vintage post-card, on which the steel colossus of a steam ship paves its way upon a cold and dark ocean. On the booklet’s back the colossus is already defeated and lies sunken into dreams like an old coral reef on the bed of the sea. Spengler and various other reveries of decline are haunting this image, while Europa wallows in restless sleep. In the lyrics of the first song the occident – blasé and emptied as it is, yet still hungry for the world – is heading for an unavoidable apocalyptic horizon, that is never to be reached. It is not the great emphatic outcry of a Götterdämmerung, much more the pitch-black hole of cultural insignificance and impotence, with the desperate lifelines showing much worse but an uproar of intellectually and spiritually impoverished moralists who only try to save their very own souls with their ridiculous appeal to this or that code of values. Is that perhaps the way the West will perish, “not with a bang, but with a whimper”? With a bang however IANVA do pulse new life into the ailing body of the occident once more. Like a monumental building becoming sound it emerges, layer by layer, soaring up from an orphic depth: the euphoric flourish of trumpets, the solid and moribund in the tragic strings, the Italian pathos in the scale of a Ennio Morricone. "L’Occidente" is the reconquista of the occidental chanson as it has been familiar to Scott Walker, the last emphatic mobilization of folk-rock, the last great European emotion right in the downfall of the West that is nothing more than a cardinal point. Though often leaving the way with the gushing gesture of the accordion, the song obscures like a hasty ride through dark clouds of fog more and more into a dry funeral beyond all romantic transfiguration. Moreover IANVA don’t stage a tragic play this time, they don’t lose themselves in the wild interaction of characters here, but always keep a clear and knowing survey from the mountaintop perspective of the storyteller. From here they witness the requiem of a soul in storms – drunken with the dark cup of nothingness it knows only decline and past blossom. A farewell to the false priests of the European utopia, who only keep struggling in bastions made of paper for nothing more than their own lives, half-affectionately and without faith. A song like a barbed hook biting into the consciousness – oratorio of the shipwrecked. Chapter two: depth of Southern Italy. Nocera Terinese, a small municipality in the mountains of Calabria, is being taken scene every Easter Sunday for an almost ritual procession of flagellants (here: "vattienti"). Carrying wreaths of thorns and being accompanied by boys clad in red dresses they wander through the village, cutting their legs with the “cardo”, a cork-disk interspersed with thirty nails or splinters of glass, until they are stained with blood, having reached a state of religious ecstasy. There is something almost Dionysian lurking behind this flagellation and indeed this ritual seems to have its roots in pre-Christian ages. Other than the Protestant and Orthodox Church, it is oddly enough the substance of Catholicism that has preserved a strong essence of Paganism. Perhaps it is due to the emphasis of procession and initiation, the arrangement of a communal cult that only substitutes the pagan ritual, without overcoming it. "Santa Luce dei Macelli" makes clear how deeply interwoven Christian and Pagan traditions are in villages like Nocera Terines – native home of singer Stefania d’Alterio – even if the lyrics allude more or less to a restoration of the “old gods”. Blood red and fiery like a strong wine, the song unfurls with hasty drunkenness its versatile, archaic flavour. After a classical prelude it enters the altar of the "abattoirs" with sacral wantonness, then plunging itself into the overcrowded alleyways, graceful as the grand Italian pop culture in times of Dalida, rural and lush as a traditional mazurka, decadent and dangerous like a faint glimpse behind the stage of a cabaret. And finally it culminates in an orchestral finale, with measures more apt than a rock opera, reminding somewhat of the British prog-folk band Fuchsia, yet more severe, firmer, stewing in the southern sun. What a song… giving proof to a grandezza and complexity as it possibly hasn’t been reached for several decades. "Santa Luce dei Macelli" is up to now IANVA’s majestic milestone, an epos consistent in itself, indulging in several surprising turnabouts it piles up in front of the listener with mythical vitality. Thereupon four minutes of an instrumental piece summon the nature of the Italian country, being situated between the calm and the mistral. Countless images of Mediterranean landscapes are joining each other, threatening and enchanting, yet always permeated by a lush liveliness. A more than inspiring and imaginative piece of music. The "ideological" circle of this release is made round again by the last track – an Italian take on the epic Strawbs classic "The Battle". IANVA’s approach is here not the one of an ordinary cover, it’s rather that the lyrics which originally depict a scene from the English bishop wars are being placed into the context of the First World War in which not bishops- and kings-men struggle for a castle but Italians and Austrians for the occupation of a mountain. Naturally the bird’s-eye view of the Strawbs version is now replaced by a pure Italian perspective. The cynical résumé of a battle taking thousands of victims without any victors other than the vultures however is still present on a more metaphorical level. Owing much respect to the Strawbs, “In Battaglia” is strongly faithful to the original, with the exception that the sound-of-the-70ies organs are replaced by even more old-fashioned trumpets and IANVA cultivating a much more solemn and profound attitude shown already in the sheer impetus of the chorals. Let’s summarize shortly: IANVA has to be considered as a group of great musicians and grandeur-singers. It is more than that a group of people with strong heart and plenty of ideas, that feel obliged to an identity establishing tradition and who at the same time summon up much courage to dare over and over again refreshing innovations out of that position. In many respects they constitute the most fierce avant-garde of an archaeofuturistic state of mind that offers a last anchor for the sinking ship, neither by revolution nor by reformation but only by remaining true to the self. Their new ep "L’Occidente" is a first ecstatic prospect to what will be seen in full glory on the horizon in near future. Wrapped in lush illustration that may appeal to nostalgic lovers of an elder Italy like a passionate stab through the heart and soul, every single split-second of this release is worth more than whole record collections. Finally, today’s music scene would be a rather poor and tasteless affair without the presence of a group like IANVA.
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