Article by Marzia Picciano
From November 28th it is possible to listen HEREsecond work by Alessandro Rebesaniin art RBSNand it is more or less from this moment that I listen to this album with the same voracious curiosity of someone who has a cake in front of him that he can't wait to take a bite of, and with every bite he seems to intuit a new flavor note to delve into, or from which to draw a subtle sense of terror, as of a world too deep to be able to codify.
In short: I have no problem joining the chorus of those people, many of them, who Alessandro tells me have already reached out to with enthusiastic messages about the album and what it represents for them, because HERE is a beautiful album, which goes down like an old fashioned done really well, that is: no frills from mixologists lost in virtuosity, just construction and depth, unique and essential ingredients; even more importantly, it has a purpose and lyrics that know how to anchor themselves in the sound and therefore in our mind. Yet every listen tickles my thought: perhaps I haven't understood it enough yet.
It's always nice when you have an Italian artist in front of you who aspires to cross national borders in terms of creativity, it's also true that you risk entering the vortex of rhetorical complimentism. After all, this is what I happened to think as soon as I ended the phone call with Alessandro, telling myself: That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all (cit.).
The truth is that RBSN, born in 1996, is a multi-instrumentalist artist who has grown artistically and professionally abroad, including Boston Berklee College of Music (London), Leeds ea San Francisco; has drawn heavily from Traditional Folk and the contamination of soul, psychedelia and jazz (today drawing inspiration from D'Angelo And Dijon), worked with sacred monsters in the Italian and international world (from Channels to Naima Adams, The Blaze And Anna Calvi) enough to have his first, very successful debut album produced Stranger Days from the legendary New York label Ropeadope Records (Snarky Puppy, Terrace Martin, Jazzanova). To say: he is among the artists who contributed to the reworking of Pietro Umiliani's melodies for Cinevox ReFramedquintessence of a meticulous work of “return to the land” or to a type of musical tradition, metaphorically speaking. If you haven't understood what I mean yet: play another championship.
HERE, exemplifying and programmatic title of a very clear concept that RBSN wants to communicate, the presence and also the duality of being present. The album, born in the first recordings in Scilla, a place that brought Alessandro back to love, is ideally divided in half, where the second part is a sort of descent into hell that opens with Down and Outa reminder to Radiohead de In Rainbows so powerful as to suggest involuntary parallels between the records, that of the English band born from the desire to break the mold in production and marketing.
Alessandro's is a record conceived by a band, which wants to mark a return but also a powerful discontinuity with Stranger Daysfrom a few years earlier, more in line but also still different from what was done with Marco Castello in WALL.
This is why when we meet, by telephone, my curiosity wants to try to understand where an artist like RBSN is going, where he wants to go, both professionally and spiritually, in the constant search for his work, in his journeys in music. Also because as Alessandro rightly says “definitely making record number two is much more important than making record number one”.
It can be said that with this album, however, you want to make a point, apply a radical change of approach.
“Of course. In fact, I believe that with my generation, in recent years, there have been what we can call leaps in quality. There have been visible ones, like Marco Castello, with whom I collaborated and who decided to go into retirement and write (for his new album, ed.). The work is also different, without a doubt, from something more, in quotation marks, adolescent like Stranger Days was, also because I was only twenty, now I'm almost thirty. So certainly some things have changed and I have also defined myself better. Even more so, the growth of my colleagues and companions has also inspired me, it has also made me understand better how to move and so on.”
If there is something obvious it is the broad vision of the album, which goes beyond national borders.
“Music in Italy certainly tends to become very ghettoized. And so in reality it is a bulwark both of my poetics and of the way in which I see my artistic career, that is, trying to mediate between Italy, which does a certain type of thing, and the rest of the world which welcomes many musicians from many places, such as Kevin Parker, AustralianD'Angelo of Richmond, Virginia, Joy Division who are English… in short, the music rolls. In Italy it is certainly more difficult to get music out that is relevant on an international level. It's something I would like to do. It's definitely a goal I give myself, in addition to wanting to make good music.”.
Looking at the contents, RBSN speaks in clips of images, you have to enter the metatext of the song to understand it. Just take for example The Bear, piece with an emotional construction (it is “pounding”, says Alessandro), a treatise on friendship that seems to play on a reference to the series of the same name (false, we just like to think so because we are people too stuffed with references).
“In general” explains “music that talks to me about things that are too ordinary bores me a bit, so I don't like doing it. Then, I grew up listening to artists who perhaps wrote very 'dense' things, which you had to hear over and over again to understand even a little what kind of person he was. Then, you could keep up with him. Which is not easy, especially for those who perhaps don't use English on a daily basis, because it's very verbose, with a million words.”
In this case, Alessandro wanted to be inspired by Dijon, then he says he made his song.
Indeed, The Bear it is a meditation on the relationships between two people and on the things that can be built together, and in this meditation he plays with juxtaposing concrete images such as someone crying in the kitchen with more metaphorical ones, even with the words of others.
“At a certain point I actually stole a fragment of a text by Dylan of a piece (It's Alright Man) that no one listens to, but in my opinion it is something incredible. He says: Money doesn't talk, it swears. What does it mean? That money is a dirty means of communicating. In The Bear, especially in the second part, I take the 'contrition' that can exist between people who love each other but in the end separate, perhaps don't understand each other, get hurt by mistake, I broaden the lens under which we see all the social dynamics a little and I talk about more general things. Like, for example: I am a young person in the era of capitalism and alienation, and I feel the weight of money as a means of communication and I agree with Dylan in saying that it sucks.”
At this point, however, the question arises spontaneously. And I decide to put it the worst way – but he lets himself be tested. Where does RBSN see itself in ten years?
Hopefully, in a place that has a lot of space and maybe even some greenery, that can accommodate a collective of people to make a record from start to finish.
“I definitely don't see myself with a lifestyle like the one I have now. Let me explain. I see among my fellow musicians, that there is also a very seasonal way of doing the job, of touring, going, speaking etc, but I am very busy in work and research, and I believe that that is where the work and practice is actually found. For this reason, what I am already trying to do now, is to create my own space, perhaps the most important thing for me when we do a job, to find a space that hosts all my creativity, in all its forms, and go from there.”
It's not the only aspiration.
“One thing I would also like to investigate is the cultural importance that Italy (understood as a country system, ed.), in making music, employs in perpetrating the recording instrument. Let me explain better. If someone in the United States makes a very good record, that record becomes part of a catalog that then goes all the way to the great pillars of 20th century music. Radiohead did this thing. Many say they are the new Beatles. For me it's bullshit, but Radiohead are certainly part of those artists who had a before and an after.”
The dream of every musician with a self-respecting ego is to leave a mark in music, it is an assumption that we take into account for practically all artists, “but I don't think that any of the people who have left a mark in the history of music have made music for that reason. In reality I would like to continue undisturbed in creating new music, new records, printing them, coming into contact with people, because it is a very beautiful world to discover. And there is always a musician, a producer who can teach something.”
Having a label like that behind you Odd Clique it helps. And Rome also has a significant role.
“For me it's home, and it's a place where I found a family of musicians that I recognize on a tribal level. Every time I return from a trip, from an experience or something that has given me or taken something away from me, in Rome I always manage to collect my thoughts, ideas, and jot something down. A beautiful cradle.”
This is true despite knowing it to be somewhat “bourgeois”, however difficult it is to do things starting from the bottom (but perhaps he says, a bit of generational change will be enough) and although Alessandro doesn't recognize himself as such; Roman in many ways.
“At the beginning of 2000, Rome was a very beautiful place to discover, so much so that there were many very vigorous artists, in the true sense of the word, who played here in Rome, and Rome was also a hub in Europe for certain cultural movements ranging from techno to alternative music. Now this thing doesn't exist, the artists stop in Milan, because Italy is a dead-end.“But perhaps by working together and with underground initiatives, he says, we can change history a little.”It would be nice to be able to create a nice physical cultural vortex.”
To change and bring about change, however, you need to travel. The dimension of the discovery, he says, is essential for Alessandro.
And luckily, he adds, the recording studio is outside Rome, and therefore the perception of the expedition is always maintained. In this year of pause and reflection, in which RBSN has had to face various changes (entourage, spaces, themes), the idea of returning more mature and precise is important. “Life leads you to discover things like, for example, if you write a song within five years, it means that it is an important thing that needs to be metabolised. And then if these songs, which have a very personal echo, also resonate with someone, then it means that the work was successful.”
To hear RBSN live, you can purchase tickets for the 2026 dates of January 9th (Baumhaus, Bologna), January 30th (Biko, Milan), January 31st (Glue, Florence).
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
