Some of my favorite albums are those like the one I’ll be sharing today by Bergamo’s own iconic Ivan Cattaneo. Il Cuore É Nudo… E I Pesci Cantano (or The Heart Is Naked… And The Fish Sing) proves again that some of our best work is done when we stop putting in front all sorts of pretense and simply surrender to what moves us the most richly. And here, we get a glorious collection of house music befitting the great awakening spirited into one of Italy’s most unique artists. Here’s to hope in a dark place.
If hindsight gives way to 20/20 vision, then it appears that Ivan’s life was leading him to this. Born in Bergamo, in 1953, Ivan originally began his young artistic career hovering between two loves: art and music. Drawn to Dada aesthetics and the music of rock experimentalists like Zappa, he high-tailed it out of Italy, to England, as fast as he could after graduating from primary school and in the early ‘70s fell into the London scene that birthed Marc Bolan, Eno, and Cat Stevens. There he cultivated his own image as this openly gay, androgynous multimedia performance artist willing to try anything once for art’s sake.
By the mid ‘70s, Ivan ventured back to Italy and convinced label Ultima Spiaggia to afford him the opportunity to put his music to tape. Back then, perhaps inspired by Italy’s prog scene, Ivan’s music (as heard on albums like Primo Secondo & Frutta (Ivan Compreso) and elsewhere) showed him trying to combine touchstones found in prevailing glam, prog folk, and euro-jazz realm, into his own niche art rock. If you’re thinking of this stage in his career as being quite Bowie-esque, you wouldn’t be a bit too off the mark. Ivan wanted to titillate as much as provoke.
While the music might have been a bit too difficult for more mainstream European audiences; in Italy, viewers were drawn to his on-stage, real life personality. He truly was an artist made for the ‘80s biding his time in the ‘70s.
In the ‘80’s, huge Italian record label CGD saw potential in Ivan and signed him up to try to launch Ivan as Italy’s unlikeliest pop star. Smoothing out a bit of his edges yielded unlikely hits like “Polisex”, “Bang Bang”, and “Quando Tramonta Il Sol”, even as the albums they lived in veered wildly from freaky new wave, italo-disco, leftfield covers of old pop standards and whatever else was floating Ivan’s boat.
All the while, as his fame grew so did Ivan’s mastery of how image sold in this new decade. Using performances on Italy’s fledgling music video programs like Mr. Fantasy or Discoring, Ivan crafted a creative vision of himself that perhaps was less scripted than the music he (knowingly) wasn’t too enamored with. Lost to time were those visionary visual ideas more tied to his original inspiration. By 1985, frequent creative and monetary struggles with his record label had soured Ivan to the whole music industry. Just a year later, he’d retire from it, resigning to continue a career as a painter. Somehow, in a flash Italy lost one of its more colorful cultural movers.
Going deep within himself, for four years Ivan dedicates himself to falling in love with music again, painting, and rekindling a sense of spiritual research. The cover to Il Cuore É Nudo… E I Pesci Cantano gives you a clue to what he was coming up with.
From 1986 to 1991, Ivan had created 100 canvases dubbed “100 Gioconda Haiku” that matched poetry with portraiture, mixing collage with abstract washes of paint, painting real-life angels in his life that brought him joy. Ivan would credit this period, his so-called “New Age” era, to his personal involvement in OSHO meditation and self-reflection.
Somehow, this therapeutic personal exercise brought him closer to the human being and creator he wanted to be. When his art toured the European peninsula with electronic music specially made by him for the occasion, Ivan was heartened by the wellspring of support and love these audiences gave him during its exhibition.
And then, at the end of their tour, so as to show his admiration, Ivan selflessly gave them all away to his dearest friends scattered all over the world. Ivan would only create and keep one for himself. It’s the one that would adorn Il Cuore É Nudo… E I Pesci Cantano. If this album was that other “thank you” he wanted to give everyone else, it had to have his personal touch.
If it sounds joyful, it’s because that’s what Ivan felt. It’s the most real he’d ever been on record and in real life. Dispatching all prior collaborators, this album would be entirely of his own creation — from music to design. Here, he’d take his spiritual inspiration and blend it with the venerational, uplifting spirit of house music — a quiet love he developed for during this period.
From luminous universal dance anthems that should have been like “L’oro Del Mondo” to complex deep house meditations like “Blummare”, Il Cuore É Nudo… E I Pesci Cantano has the makings of an album that feels at ease being itself. Balearic grooves “Tao Tu” and “Little Gay” probe into spirituality in a way that’s truer to those infinitely in the most need of its divination. If many hands make light, here’s to another of its glorious rays of light.