FREEDOM IN THE EYES that touches Pescara – Rockon.it

Article by Marzia Picciano | Photo by Giulia Troncon (Bologna date)

If I could, really, freely write the account of concert by Niccolò Fabi from last night, October 26a PescaraI would start simply like this: “Hi Niccolò. Thanks for making me cry for two and a half hours straight. I couldn't do it for too many months.” It would also be a way to justify myself in the eyes of my neighbors in a row, but I would say that this is the least of my problems.

Now, Fabi always jokes about his, like yesterday too official trademark as a singer-songwriter dedicated to the ancient art of cathartic and liberating sadness, yet he knows it, he is truly aware, of being one of the few male singer-songwriters (which is an important aspect, eh) to speak to us metaphorically straight in the eyes by putting together a lot of words, images, thoughts, in short to tell us a lot of things that we have perhaps touched on in our thoughts for a moment, and realized that they hurt a lot, have we pushed back into the antechamber of conscience, under the carpet like dust?

Adding, then, a significant arrangement, this tour accompanied by the everlasting curators of his songs (as if they were his own, he says), Roberto Angelini And Alberto Bianco (who made a good album a couple of years ago, we talked about it here), Filippo Cornaglia, Giulio Cannavale, Cesare Augusto Giorgini and the sound engineer Riccardo Parravicini.

In my opinion yes. Then it is worth saying it with great intellectual honesty. I went to Fabi's yesterday to have a good cry. And I'm not being ironic, far be it. Crying is good, but not everyone knows how to do it. This is why I decided to do it at my home, at the Teatro Massimo, in Pescara. And to close a circle.

Pescara is also a city that Fabi has known since his early days, the first outside of Rome where he performed at the beginning, and above all it is my home. Ok, wherever he goes he never fails to hit the mark, I saw him at Overhead crane years ago (and also in the mountains of Torninparte for Soundscapes, a few years later), the effect has always been the same, a bit of an epiphany, a bit of a slap in the face, always closed with this semi-euphoric collective ritual of Leave yourself for a day in Rome. Whether you're in the theater or in an open space you just start jumping.

For Freedom in the Eyesthe latest effort born in six weeks locked in a cabin in Val Di Sole, putting down the record and feelings, we enter an even more essential dimension. The essential protagonists are the lights. An army of bulbs of a hypothetical starry sky, which sometimes illuminates you, sometimes not, in short, after all in life sometimes you are under the good star, sometimes you have to look for it. Then visuals that crawl quickly across the ceiling of the theater like Conradian torrents. Below, on the stage, only the people.

Or rather, the artists, who even more with this tour demonstrate that in addition to knowing how to speak clearly without too many frills to the kind heart (semi-cit) you also need to know how to keep it immersed in a suitable sound aquarium, much more electronic, much more daring, so much so that you have had an almost à la vision Sigur Ros during a bass and keyboard duet between Bianco and Fabi.

So even if the concert lineup does not ignore Fabi's historical pieces, it still selects those that most align with the mood behind Freedom in the Eyesare the ones that most seem to be in continuity with the message that Fabi and his team wanted to send with this album (Going Beyond, Who Quits Wins, Far From Me, A Sum of Small Things, Hot, Let's Pretend) which in the end for me is what is contained in two verses of No Battle: “There is always ivy/Growing on the ruins”.

And here we return to closing the circle. The entire lineup of this tour is a circle, which starts from the awareness of me being in the pause between understanding and changing (Sunrise) until being alone in the present of Freedom in the Eyes. The cure for suffering for every beautiful thing that inevitably ends is to enter into oneself, face oneself and turn inside out like a sock. It is a path that we follow alone, even if we often seem to continue to constantly speak with someone else, with the other, with the one who constantly puts us in crisis, even when he is no longer there.

And in the end perhaps we also need some space to get away from ourselves, because of course, being with ourselves like this can be suffocating, and above all it doesn't make us clear observers of the world around us. Fabi intelligently responds to the question that all of us, not just the artists who constantly scrutinize their own interiority, ask ourselves when we see that in another world, yet still the same as ours, the almost banal (never) essential rights that we enjoy are trampled on senselessly: “and what do we do?The answer perhaps lies within, how we educate ourselves to see it, to see ourselves.

So crying is not so obvious, and no, there is no irony in doing so.

I needed to see Niccolo Fabibecause I was denied the possibility of building silently, perhaps because I was too silent, and I had to take this tour inside and outside of myself. To my house, to bring everything home.

Click here to see the photos of Niccolò Fabi in Bologna or browse the gallery below.

NICCOLO FABI – The lineup of the Pescara concert

1. Sunrise
2. Go further
3. And it's not
4. A sum of small things
5. Love happens
6. No battle
7. Gemma's house
8. Who knows me better than you (feat. Roberto Angelini)
9. The chalk circles
10. I am the other
11. Hot
12. Here you are
13. Whoever quits wins
14. A hand over the eyes
15. A good idea
16. Build
17. Freedom in the eyes
18. Encore:
19. Let's pretend
20. Away from me
21. Leave yourself for a day in Rome