Review of Fassbinder Wunderkammer by Alessandra Novaga, Setola di Maiale, 2017
I apologize if, as writing these notes, I would make some clarifications. This record “talks” about cinema, no doubt. My problem is that I’m not a movie expertise, I do not know Fassbinder’s movies, or their soundtracks so this review will try to talk about the music contained in this vinyl record skipping (mea culpa ) the context that generated it.
In this sense, I will support the cinematic music definition given by David Shea in the book “Panta” edited by Enrico Ghezzi: “The term of cinematic music it’s useful to refer to pieces that create an independent filmic sonority on the image, but linked to specific images or external references, otherwise then by theme or pieces where the soundtracks are separates from the movie medium. “(page 329).
In this sense, for me, the music on this disc is by definition cinematic. What did I find on this record? Many things, some music, some linked instead to my knowledge about Alessandra Novaga’s thought and her way of working on. The recording, deliberately lo-fi both for the music and for the Alessandra’s voice, which was first recorded on a tape recorder and than modified with an analog technique already in vogue at the punk times, with the result, aesthetically and attractively inconsistent like a to a deja-vu lo-fi out of fashion since 1977, so out of fashion that it is now universally accepted as a signature style.
The sound is .. almost post-punk, Manchester 80s, like if Johnny Marr’s guitar derails with a Marc Ribot’s style, still fresh in fact encountering his long apprenticeship with Tom Waits and Laurie Anderson, without that impoverishment of the sound that made his stylistic trademark before he could turn it into a compositional principle …
And the clean sound, especially acoustic and classical, with the Classical Conservatory that peeks over the left shoulder, almost dirge harpsichord Frankfurter, there is the baroque back there, some concealed, folded in the same fold as Deleuze wrote, disguised with a Morricone’s echo , dilated, reverberated to seek more space, greater breath …
I apologize again, I do not know Fassbinder and, believe me, I’m not proud of it, but I know a little about “Wunderkammer”, one of the movies’ forerunners, progenitor of Cinerama and vision landscape and the sense of the fantastic and the cinema itself, Don’t you believe me? Read Giuliana Bruno … or visit the Museum of Natural History in Venice.
And the guitar played like a cello … Tom Cora … Arthur Russell? It ‘s almost funky in its reflected nakedness … or maybe Paolo Angeli? Paolo? No no … he is not so gloomy .. Alessandra cello/guitar is a foggy cello .. hoarse … more Dubliners than Germanic…
The Soldato Americano.that almost breaks Scarborough Fary … with the guitar that sounds like Morricone first and than almost rockabilly after a while..and Kurt Weil … ah wow .. how couldn’t have I think about that before …. impossible not to think about Hal Willner and his work …
Quotes? Maybe. Involuntary, certainly, but in the end what does it matter? I think if you’ll love the Fassbinder film also you will love this record and you will love its ghosts even if, like me you do not know the German filmmaker, because in the end, in a vinyl record the image is lost, out of the movie, but … who cares? Surely this is the record that best represents now Alessandra Novaga: there are her guitars, her past as a classical musician who is not right to deny, the cleanliness of her sound, the desire to change it now that it’s gone beyond the sheet on which he had formed, precisely the desire, the desire to re-read everything and start over leaving her ghosts behind. A great job, good Alessandra.
NeuGuitars 