Three years after the debut with “Temporalità”, a record that had already highlighted Mimmo Pesare's ability to build stratified sound architectures making use of significant collaborations such as those with Emidio Clementi, Georgeanne Kalweit and Gianluca De Rubertis, the Ninotchka project continues its research path with a new piece that confirms its authorial signature. After the tribute to Massimo Volume in the company of Mauro Ermanno Giovanardi and the recent “Lune di Gaza” with Amerigo Verardi, comes “Ninnarella”, a song that anticipates the second studio album and which features one of the most recognizable voices on the Italian scene, that of Andrea Chimenti.
The meeting between Ninotchka's aesthetics, suspended between trip-hop suggestions, post-rock breaths and singer-songwriter-inspired songwriting, and Chimenti's deep, twilight voice generates an expressive short circuit of notable impact. The text moves between visionary lyricism and denunciation, building a sort of secular psalm that passes through the rubble of the present: “The gods fall, the saints fall… The present burns, History sleeps”, while the form of the lullaby here becomes an instrument of resistance, a song of vigil in a dystopian landscape where “dolls jump over mines”.
Yet in the desolation a stubborn glimmer of hope emerges contained in the verse “Gone the voices, the songs remain”, the emotional core of the song and almost a manifesto of the idea that art and music can survive the collapse. The ending in French adds a note of unexpected tenderness, like a final caress after the bitter breath of the song, while Chimenti's interpretation gives everything a suspended, almost ritual dimension, in which his persuasive voice becomes the perfect vehicle for this nocturnal vision of a shattered world.
The picture is completed by the animations of the lyric video taken from the works of Carmìne Antonucci, a Taranto painter of international scope whose visual work dialogues perfectly with the poetic and visionary dimension of the project. With “Ninnarella”, Ninotchka reiterates a precise vision in which the song becomes a space for crossing contemporary crises, confirming an original and recognizable artistic path while waiting for the new LP. Listen to the single below:
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
