He's back with a new album, but above all he's back among people. The consul general by Flavio Giurato is a return to the body even before the discography. «It's a great feeling to see the public again, to do concerts, I like to feel the hugs of the people who love me», explains the singer-songwriter while his eighth studio work, eight songs on digital platforms and in 500 numbered copies on vinyl, presents itself as an object out of line with the market. It is a record that reiterates an old battle of his: the one against standardized time. “It's not a question of going out of time, but of making it more flexible to the feelings that each of us expresses.” So in The consul general time is not abolished, but bent, made more human and fickle: «The only metronome I accept is that of the heart, of the heartbeat».
It is not a provocation or an aesthetic statement, but a precept that he has always used. In the studio, in fact, Giurato works as he always has, without a music stand or sheets of paper: «I've never had them. For me there must be no diaphragms between the sound emission and the microphone that receives it.” What matters is only the expression: «When one plays and sings one must know everything by heart, even if it is not easy because, often, mine are quite complex pieces. They leave one way, they go another way and then, perhaps, they come back.” In this process, even the song form is questioned: «I have never even followed the classic song form, I preferred to use the various forms based on what I feel. There is a non-industrial measurement of time, because emotions have an influence.”
If The consul general looks forward, it does so by dialogue with a recent path that is still suspended. Recent Happeningsthe album in English that he let us listen to live in his home-studio in Rome, remains on stand-by for now: «It hasn't been released and for now it won't be released. I have presented it in some live performances, but because public performance can give me the temperature of the work.” A record still open to mutations: «I'm just thinking about whether to open up to a full band arrangement in the last piece. The album is finished but not yet mastered.” And he makes a suggestion, in true Giurato style: «I let it mature in oak barrels on some Scottish island, like good whisky». On the other hand, his last record release was almost nine years ago, in 2017, with The promises of the world.
The consul generalMeanwhile, there is. And it's not a reassuring record. It speaks of identity, of confession, of destiny, openly placing itself “in the era of the replacement of intelligence”. An album of denunciation that sounds like intellectual resistance: «These are beautiful words and I agree with them. What is happening is inevitable, we have made this world a daily crap. If the machines, at a certain point, say “that's enough, we'll take care of it” we shouldn't be surprised.”
The lyrics travel through extreme places: the cosmos of childhood, the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the juvenile prison, the white cliffs of Dover. As if space were an emotional grammar rather than a geographical one: «I work a lot with images and I actually saw the cliffs of Dover at night, they are a spectacle of nature that leaves you breathless». Even the cover image responds to this logic: «It is made by a poet and not by a graphic designer. I call it quantum. We are entering the quantum era and we need to worry. We survived Covid and wars, but the real topic will be artificial intelligence.” And he launches a prophecy: «For Rolling Stone I can tell you what will be the challenge of the next few years: quantum physics which will change our lives.”
In the midst of this epochal change, both technological and human, surprisingly there remains a declared and never denied love for the most mainstream and criticized Italian popular tradition: «I love Sanremo, I've been following it since I was a kid. I saw Domenico Modugno interpret In the blue, painted blueso it is linked to my life.” An almost archival affection: «Even an edition that wasn't shown on television I recorded entirely on tapes. I still have it. I have a profound love for the Festival.”
Photo: Ludovica De Santis
In the last year, then, there is within him the satisfaction of those who have picked up his artistic baton and made it explode at the Ariston and Eurovision. Giurato remembers how he met Lucio Corsi, who always listed him among his references: «Before one of my concerts in 2018 in Milan, a boy arrived during the soundcheck and said: “My name is Lucio Corsi, I come from Grosseto, in the Maremma, and I would like to open your live show”». And he replied: “Open whatever you want.” Then success and a fatherly warning written via text message: “Don't become a cog in a gear, don't let yourself be squeezed like a lemon.” After a year, the same advice remains for Giurato: «I hope he can maintain his candid inspiration, he has a beautiful world of his own».
To immerse yourself in the world of Flavio Giurato, however, all you have to do is listen The consul generalcomposed, arranged and produced by the singer-songwriter, recorded and mixed at Studio Verde in Rome, mastered at Reference Studio, without analogue or digital metronomes, «in accordance with the phases of the moon». A record that doesn't ask you to stop time, but to listen to its beat.
