If everything comes back in the end, it's worth understanding how you sowed. What the sold out of the first stage of the tour tells us by Pier Cortese And Roberto Angelini on October 3rd in Santeria Toscana in Milan, together with Niccolò Fabi is that in life we must practice value, stoically, and also friendship, the true one. Which is art too.
The beginning of the tour of Pier Cortese and Roberto Angelini, historical collaborators of Nicolò Fabi, in art Discoverlandfor the promotion of their latest album (we could say first real album of unreleased songs), Ero, starts from Milan, Santeria Toscana, yesterday 3 October, while in Milan what is a clear beginning of winter is taking place, under the downpour and the tears and blood that the Minister of Finance has promised us for next year. Together with Fabi, who wrote the lyrics for three of the duo's songs. It would seem like the perfect start to an evening dedicated to crying, but instead it turns out to be the best escape from reality I could imagine. Among other things, it was completely sold out, thanks also to the presence of the Roman singer-songwriter. But here we need to think differently, which goes beyond a question of tickets sold and attendance.
The experience of Discoverland live is that of a journey, as if on purpose, into a dimension in which Italian songwriting takes inspiration from and freely reinterprets the international one, integrating pedal steel, electronics (lots and lots of English clubbing) and tribalisms and refrains. The result is a spiritual journey that has nothing banal, nothing of an Italian experience, nothing of the cinepanettone effect that the assumptions underlying the theorem might suggest, but a very powerful experience, as much as the aura of its authors. It is an intense and dense live show, it describes a light liturgy of who we are and where we are going (this is the leitmotif of the eight songs on the album) in which our shaman is a unique and triune entity that manifests itself without interruption in a an attentive guide yet ready to let us travel far away, if only we wanted to.
This is “I was“, an album with an evocative title, which puts into practice what Cortese and Angelini have experimented so well that they made yet another album, Drugstore, in which the two operate what is the quintessence of pleasure for every artist capable of picking up an instrument : the mashup, understood as a virtuosic form of the good old cover. Drugstore was concrete proof that the two, in addition to being excellent musicians and 360-degree connoisseurs of music, were also expert decoders of the secrets hidden in the various hooks and chords of multiple songs (of which, however, we must say: it's not that we didn't believe them capable, even if I was enlightened to hear James Blake intertwined with Once Upon a Time in America, with all due respect to the purists), so Ero is in fact the next step, fundamentally born and according to them from the desire to take a step forward, Fabi's (very respectful) speech and a trip to India for a concert by the latter. Ero is therefore the White Album of Discoverland, but also of Fabi. But let's not reduce everything, and songs like Karmatango and Gange, to the mere mathematical result of a Beatles-flavored expedition.
The synergy of the three on stage is unattainable, but then again, what else could you expect from three lifelong friends and collaborators? And even if Fabi is present exclusively in the role of “support” and that's how he wants to be, essentially standing aside for the entire live, limiting himself to a few words at the end or to the drum machine or the choirs or to singing the same songs he gave substance to with a text, it's impossible to disentangle it from the final product, from the world they created. It's “all heart”, someone in the audience suggests to me, and hearts are fine with everything, but above all they pulsate. So peace for the frantic cries of those who mainly saw the entire performance as those of those who gave meaning to all the stories closed in Rome (a mention not by chance, given that the slightest mention of it was made by Cortese and Angelini, sending the skis at my side were in raptures). If this may seem like an element to the detriment of the duo, on the contrary I want to reiterate how it is instead an added value. The sign that friendship – and what comes from it, or comes out of it for the public domain and pleasure – is a rare flower, capable of making us shine.
In a music scene desperately searching for the “feat” that brings more streaming, the three-way partnership that then effectively becomes a duo – as if to say: the power of the trio coincides with mine – among these subjects is something rare, to be protected, putting species in danger of extinction under the category, or under a display case, under a Roman sky which is that bubble of habitat where Fabi, Cortese and Angelini, supported from time to time by other artist friends, produce and experiment – and organize trips in the east. Proof of this is the opening of Leo Pari and Alessandro Ragazzo, the former not exactly emerging, the latter more so, both promoted by La Fabbrica Dischi and above all by Discoverland and Fabi (with Leo Pari the birth of what will be then Ero), not so much because it was about promoting, but more because what came out of it for those who were there to listen was the comforting sensation of seeing a group of people together again, friends, as if to say: certain things, at least, they don't change. The magic of those who have spent a life not dodging but welcoming the blows, the edges and therefore also the caresses of the other is a chemistry that has little that is extemporaneous and irrational. It is a conscious practice, of those who always choose themselves, every day, despite everything. It's Amori con le Ali, the song that Fabi symbolically dedicates to him at the end of the concert, after the two played slides and guitar on the singer-songwriter version of venire via con me and a mashup of Kings Of Convenience and Bjork.
To those who say that in the end it's still them (they must be acknowledged for not having at least given themselves a name from a Spielberg film) the answer must be: yes, and thank goodness. The Capitoline ecosystem which includes these three entities, among others, is a breed of songwriting that we deeply need. And also of those who explain to us well how karma works. And to trust more, and sow better.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
