Hello PanoPeople!
Time runs fast: just three weeks to the big event!
Time for us to start giving you further info on the great bands composing the line-up of Panoplie Italian Nights III.
Let us start from what undeniably is the most awaited band:
Massimo Volume!
Awaited not just here in Luxembourg: their reunion (6 years after the split-up) has been one of the biggest events of last year, in Italy.
Massimo Volume formed in Bologna during the winter of 1991 and later signed their first record contract with Underground Rec, to publish their debut record Stanze (Rooms) in 1993. The band has an extremely personal sound: big impact, tension and distortion alternate with more introspective moments, that still maintain, in any case, a strong emotional charge. The record receives good feedback, both from critics and public.
Concerts follow one after the other. In 1994, major labels notice the band and, at the beginning of March, Massimo Volume sign a contract with Wea, which will publish their second work, Lungo i bordi (Along the edges). Artistic production is entrusted to Fausto Rossi, considered by the band members the example of how to make music without any kind of market oriented restriction. The relationship is not always easy, but inspired enough to give birth to one of the cornerstones of new rock. The band has finally removed all link to foreign models and the record is powerful, its sound unmistakable.
Even John Cale notices the band, proposing himself to produce the third record, Da Qui (From here), a job that will then be entrusted to Steve Piccolo (ex Lounge Lizard). We are in 1997 and Massimo Volume are now signed to the label Mescal. “Da Qui” is influenced by the project Clementi and Sommacal, carried on in the period elapsed between their two last albums: a sort of laboratory where, the new songs were shaped through live performances for voice, guitar and harmonium. Music is minimal, evocative, while the lyrics weave short stories with characters recurring song after song and creating a real, tangible poetic world, the same we find in Gara di Resistenza (Endurance race), a collection of short stories published in the mean time by Emidio Clementi, which will be followed in January 1999 by his first novel, Il Tempo di Prima (The time before) and by a new record, produced by Manuel Agnelli from Afterhours.
Club Privé catches a bit unprepared critics and audiences and marks a new escape line in the artistic path of the band. For the first time, Emidio not only reads his lyrics but sings in a few tracks. Music has traveled from the violent impact of the beginnings to flavours of jazz and lyrics themselves are not short stories anymore, but brush-strokes painting a world of feelings and memories that colour masterfully the last chapter of a musical history which becomes more and more fascinating.
The tour, started straight after the publishing of the album, went on over the whole peninsula side by side with a new project, Gli agnelli clementi, a reading shared by Emidio “Mimì” Clementi and Manuel Agnelli (also with Pasquale De Fina). Later, the band recorded the original soundtrack for the movie Almost Blue, which included songs already featured in their albums and some instrumental tracks among which a cover of the classical Elvis Costello song.
On September 28th 2001, Fazi Editore published Emidio’s second novel, La notte del pratello (Pratello’s night), but in February 2002 suddenly arrived the news no one would have ever wanted to read: Massimo Volume breaking up and bringing to an end their artistic journey.
Each of them took on new projects in the following years: Vittoria Burattini played with Franklin Delano, while Egle Sommacal published a solo record, Legno. Mimì Clementi dedicated his time to the project El-Muniria, publishing the CD Stanza 218 with Homesleep Records, and to his third novel, L’ultimo Dio, published in 2004. In early 2009 Mimì has published his fifth book (fourth novel), Matilde e i suoi tre padri (Matilde and her three fathers).
But in 2008, after a six years hiatus, Massimo Volume accept to share again their music with the audience. Two main events mark their comeback on Italian stages: the participation to the Traffic Festival on a special night with Patti Smith and Afterhours and the sonorization of the movie La caduta di casa Usher (The fall of the house of Usher), a fascinating project realized on behalf of the Turin Museum of Cinema and brought to the scene, in the same city, at Officine Grandi Riparazioni (OGR).
Finally Massimo Volume were ready to start again where they had stopped six years earlier with their live activity and those who were lucky enough to witness their reunion in Turin can guarantee how much this was needed in the Italian artistic landscape!
Mimì Clementi participated to the first edition of Panoplie Italian Nights, in 2007, with a reading of L’ultimo Dio, accompanied by Massimo Carozzi.
At the time, he said he hoped to come back with a full band: well, there he goes!
Not to be missed, absolutely!!
Cheers
Panoplie Team
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