Lucio Leonardi's sound project under the name Pluhm continues its coherent path in experimental electronics with a fair amount of prolificacy. “The fall (the last song)” is the new attempt to describe the end of life in music, which continues a journey already traced in his previous discography, primarily with “Canzoni discurio e luce” (2022). The subject is the fall of the ego, that is, the end of one's most authentic essence, an event that precedes death understood as the simple dissolution of the body.
“La Caduta (l'ultimo canto)” is therefore a new reflection on the effects of the cognitive decay of the human mind and is therefore linked to the monumental “Everywhere At The End Of Time” by Caretaker, becoming a new piece of a hypothetical sound library on the theme, together perhaps with the song “Approximate Study Of A Human Mind” by compatriot Camilla Pisani. The concept album of the Pluhm project consists of five long songs (on average eight minutes) separated from each other by short interludes of about forty seconds.
The main theme is dissociation, the disconnection between mind and reality, the loss of the mind's ability to process and perceive the surrounding world, which ultimately translates into the true loss of the inner self, not of one's body still present as a mere object physicist. Consequently, distortions dominate (“C'era un senso che se n'andava”), interspersed with moments of rare melodic memories as in the plans wrapped in chaos of “C'era un memoria che s'obfuscava”.
In “Among the remaining traces of memory I was looking for” (the longest and most elaborate piece) the sound seems to be that of a distorted guitar in slow motion that moves in the desert of a now lost mind, before rediscovering a vague logical sense (some notes of synth) only to be once again enveloped in a vortex of distortions.
This journey into the unknown finds its end in “Buried by Nothing”, a sort of dark symphony of dark and merciless synths, mere notes that float – just as the title suggests – in the nothingness of what is left, and finally ends in a short piano composition: perhaps the only hope that, after all, all this isn't really the end.
05/08/2024
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM