nayt I Individual album review by Anna Ida Cortese
“I no longer recognize myself, yet I continue to look for myself.”
Cesare Pavese
Listening theor Individual I had the feeling of entering a flow of consciousness that never really stops, as if each song was connected to the next more by necessity than by structure, and the only possible way was to go through it all, from beginning to end, and then perhaps start again, but without the pretense of putting everything back in order.
It's like reading someone's mind and staying there, with your thoughts still open, while things pop up, turning on and off, like a strobe light in the dark: enough to glimpse something, never enough to give you a complete picture.
And then you remain within that fragmentation, in that continuous tension between understanding and not being able to fully understand, like when you have the sensation of having arrived close to something, but that something shifts a moment before becoming clear.
A record that leaves you wondering
There is a word that runs throughout the album, even when it is not explicitly said: exist.
Exist (more than me) it opens a crack that doesn't close, because the point here is not to feel good or feel bad, but not to really recognize the way in which one is in the world. It's as if a shared code is missing, something that others seem to have and that you continue to look for.
This feeling turns into distance. Not an angry distance, but a distance that observes, that records, that takes note. As The astronautwho looks at the planet from outside and recognizes it, but is no longer able to inhabit it in the same way.
And within this movement, even relationships become something unstable, never completely defined. We get close, we touch each other, but there is always a gap.
“This addiction is not love.”
Yet just saying it isn't enough to change things.
There remains an ambiguous area in which need and affection continue to merge.
Everything moves: identity, cage, language
“You are born in this cage, you die in it.”
But the cage never has a precise shape. It continually shifts: sometimes it's the system, sometimes it's the mind, sometimes it's the conditions from which you start. And maybe it's all these things together.
The point is that it cannot be fully defined, and for this reason it remains. It accompanies you without declaring itself, like something you feel but can't really name.
Identity also moves within this instability. theor Individual it seems like a declaration, but over the course of the album it cracks, opens up, is questioned.
“Where is the line between me and another individual?”
It is not a question that seeks a definitive answer, but a line that continues to shift. The self becomes something that is observed as it changes, that is constructed as it is questioned.
And at a certain point language also emerges, as if the problem was no longer just experiencing things, but actually being able to say them.
“Maybe it all starts from language.”
Writing it then becomes a necessary, almost physical gesture. Writing to cross, to stay, to not lose what continues to escape.
Words are not enough, but they are the only way we have to try to keep the pieces together.
Music without borders, writing that remains
There's a moment when it becomes clear that trying to pigeonhole this album into a genre is no longer useful.
And perhaps it is precisely there that we should stop for a moment and question our way of listening, because in the attempt to label everything we end up losing what the music is really doing.
Musically, nayt it combines urban and songwriting, but does so without remaining within either. It crosses them, uses them, overcomes them, without ever turning them into a limit.
What remains is a very strong internal coherence, which holds everything together: direct, sincere writing, capable of giving voice to the depth, the restlessness and the contradictions of the human being without having to simplify them.
nayt today he has one of the most incisive writings we have in Italy, because he doesn't try to explain more, but manages to get deeper.
A record that starts again as it ends
The album opens with Writing and that sentence:
“Searching for purpose, uncomfortable journey” and ends with Contradictions – Interludewith that ending that doesn't sound like a closure but like an invitation:
“Ok, try again.”
Two extremes that are not really opposites, but that touch each other, overlap, almost to the point of creating a loop.
Because that “ok, try again” is not just a point of arrival, it is also a starting point. It's as if he's telling you that you can start over, that you can listen to everything again, but in a different way.
And in this sense the album doesn't end.
It reopens.
There is no single solution, there is no definitive answer. There is a movement that continues, a reflection that broadens, that tries to become a dialogue.
I Individual it doesn't try to explain what we are, but goes through the impossibility of being so definitively. It does not return a stable form, it does not close, it does not simplify.
It leaves you with something that isn't an answer, but a feeling that lingers.
And which, precisely because it remains, leads you to go back, to listen again, to start again.
Better songs: Writing, You are born there, you die there, The astronaut, Before that, Existing (more than me), Contradictions – Interlude
Vote: Nine ✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰✰
Full tracklist:
- Writing
- Exist (more than me)
- The astronaut
- You are born there, you die there
- A man
- Origins – Interlude
- Meeting point
- Strong
- Stupid thought (feat. Elisa)
- Before
- Goodbye xx
- Being us
- Contradictions – Interlude
Ph: The album cover is an acrylic painting on canvas 120x120cm hand painted by the artist Ozy and inspired by the photography “De Schimmel” (1992), taken by the iconic German photographer Hannes Wallrafen.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
