Interferenze Blu, 11-12/1995
THE BEAUTY THAT IS IN THE FRAILTY OF THE MAN
KIRLIAN CAMERA is an Italian band already from several years entered in part of that fascinating
and a little mysterious <<cult-band>> place, appellative surely merited in front of the homogeneous
value of their discography, characteristic that marked at the end an abyss comparing to the other bands
of the peninsula, and it projected it over state's borders and then in all the Europe, bright like all the night
stars.
The K.C. <<project>>, we could say with no fear, gravitates around the emblematic figure of
Angelo Bergamini, omnipresent mind and guide. The female face of K.C. is instead sculpted in the lines
of the eterne muse Emilia Lo Jacono, notable vocalist indeed, able to bound from a language to another
one without accuse a little problem and instead putting in good evidence, from time to time, the perfect
pronunciation. The third element is Simon Balestrazzi. Notwithstanding his figure remains a little in shade,
compared to Angelo and Emilia, it was and is not less indispensable to the realization of that cathedral
of sounds raised up with extreme dedition. About external collaborators that till today are exchanged,
we don't mention the names because they would be too many. Instead we can't not notice their perfect
insertion in the project, fact due surely to their artistical skills, but even to the careful supervision of Angelo.
Listening to their music, there is the impression that an invisible thread of sounds is there to unite
the various albums, marking an unique path, maybe from ever traced in their minds.
A constant sperimental impulse, filled of bright poetry and chilly electronic, makes this music one of
the most intelligent chapters of these years, able like few to define the deep beauty that is in the frailty of
the man.
In Eklipse Zwei mini cd of 93, all the anguish of our century lives, in the darkness of an eclipse that it
seems never finish: soft light rays lost in the infinite night, statues stare nothing in the modern decadence in
the disenchantment of an epoch that suffers more than ever the pain of living and the anguishful search of
an identity. Our time hidden by an infinite eclipse chills in the soul's abyss, though in that sad chant it seems
shine a soft light of hope, maybe a faith never lost.
The 1991 album Todesengel is a beautiful black flower. Considered a real masterpiace, it evidences
definively the potentials of the band always more distant from the italian musical reality, and instead more
easily leading to an european scene. Tosesengel... <<the fall of life>> is an album that strains torment
anguish and fear: it opens these macabre dances the cover of Vienna of Ultravox, completely changed. A
spectral doleful song takes possession always more of the music in the pulsating cardiac beats, and strains
like the night the implacable singing of Angelo remaining a shiver enveloped in a beatiful torment. Other
cover of the album is We Will Rock You of Queen. Here maintaining the original rhythmic they amuse with
filtered voices and distorted guitars, in ten minutes and more of spectacular music to say little.
From always K.C. plays various different covers with incredible results, able how they are to change
a piece with light touches hit with art and making nice in a different light, that however maintains the original
version in an extreme fusion. Ability in common maybe only with Bauhaus, dark band of eighties able to
mix the punk hysteria with the tenebrous darkness of overflowing gothic music, leaving fall here and there
on his tormentous road, made of dark sounds and anguish lyrics the most wonderful covers, as beautiful
esotic flowers. Makes shivers the voice of Peter Murphy that lives on everything and anybody like a bat
in the night.
The rest of the album proceeds in moments of soft light suffocated by overflowing darkness: the slow
going generates spectral nightmares; every gesture, every movement is fixed waiting for a hope that seems
never arrive. And to finish just two words about Ars Moriendi that surely is one of the more inspired things
that K.C. have written. Here dominates the sound of organ and synth generating an intense religious
atmosphere, that one that investes the people in the churchs and in the cemetaries... and the spirit flies high
in the infinite light, so perfect!
La Notte
<<I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER, WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?>> (Nevermore, Verlaine)
With (Erinnerung) the musical creativity of Angelo Bergamini seems arrived to a distinctive stadium
of purity. Curtailed and naked, but without politenesses of bareness. It would seem born in this way, if
some fold don't show the stopped parameters, some fallen branches. They are scars left by the memory,
pictures of statues and monuments in background, as the Door of Branderburg oriental limit to the avenue
UNTER DEN LINDEN, together the baroque Palace of Charlottenbourg, unique berlinese vestiges of
the past, saved from the war. That remember the natal places of Lieder of Schubert: <<Lime-tree>> and
<<At the Fountain out Door>>, but now they are only rare glitters in a picture composed by soul
fragments. They stand to indicate how more music and truth there is in the nuances, instead in the contrasts.
It arrives, so purified, this poetry, transparent but not without the tastes of a theater of the memory:
Remember me: in its romantic anguish strenghted by chord instruments, it's with a generous and
desperate passionality.
Veronika Voss: it's a fluid picture, or better a mental act of insured of the private memories: suggestive
in their simplicity. The song for piano (Memories are made of this) re-takes the fassbinderer Veronika Voss.
Days of Laura Zero: it opens with the true voice of Adolf Hitler that is an effect explanation of the past,
till signal the unbalance of the modern sensibility contended between the necessity to maintain the remembrance
to conserve the beauty of life and impossibility to do it in front of the war horrors. It affirms, so, in the same
name of Laura Zero the inevitableness of the year zero, in which is acceptable to see a painful re-born exile
of the storical memory, parallel to the rebuilding of Berlin: city of present.
Sea of memory: it's the chant of the remembrance that turns in water, sea, sound and flows among the
fingers, in the mind, soaks our shoes and try to suffocate us to let emerge, pressing, questions that are desires:
Where is my lover?
Where is my father?
repeats the voice of Emilia. Who listens to it once, never forget it.
Decus
Taken from: http://www.arpnet.it/interf/rivista/interf00/interf11.htm
English translation: Adalberto Orrigo