In a not-so-recent interview with Vice Italy, Lino Capra Vaccina laments that out of his recently reissued work we’re missing most of the picture of what he was trying to do. While Antico Adagio was one of these wonderful totems of Italian minimalism, it wasn’t until a decade, or so, later, in the mega rare L’Attesa, that Lino actually had the years of experience and applied technique to actually flesh out those ideas (in a much grander way). L’Attesa is my favorite work of Lino’s not because it reads like the work of someone who’s moved past the point of experimentation, but because it sounds like someone whose found his footing and looks to move you into his creative sphere.
Milanese-raised Lino Capra began his musical career as a member of Italian neofolk group Aktuala. Mostly self-taught, he came into that crew as a percussionist interested in exploring world music, with an accent on how one could tie it into the psychedelic world. After joining the group in the early ‘70s, by the mid ‘70s Lino had grown tired of the entirely free form music they had created, and the new, more “prog” direction they were heading, and began to explore fleshing out his own compositions elsewhere.
Ideas and techniques driven by the tantric music of Africa or the hypnotic gamelan music of Asia were of some influence. The “spiritual” trance music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley was another. Antico Adagio, his debut, was his attempt to capture on tape all sorts of new studies that he was interested in, but wasn’t able actually follow, in a group setting. Playing all sorts of percussive instruments, whether strung, malleted, or cast, Antico Adagio was an example of Lino trying to stretch out the sonorities of Italian music into these other realms. Once again, touch points like those found in the music of Popol Vuh and the Third Ear band were present in this era of Lino’s music. Released with little fanfare and in a tiny pressing, it’s still a minor miracle that Antico Adagio was able to be rediscovered.
L’Attesa was recorded and released at the beginning of the ‘90s. Years of performing as a session musician (with Franco Battiato and others) had afforded Lino a degree of liberty to rekindle his own work in due course. On this occasion, Lino had fallen under the ideas of Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, of making fourth world music that supplanted his ethnological musical research with actual practice, in moving music elsewhere. Rather than try to create a pastiche of unknown styles, in L’Attesa, Lino tried to create some imagined space where actual melodies (things that were sometimes misplaced/forgotten in Antico Adagio) now actually carry you through all sorts of ethereal, soft, yearning music.
Tinged with all sorts of nostalgia and soft-pedaled steps into modern technology, weirdly Lino discovers that not all that’s yet to be discovered lays in the past. Roberto Doninni, another brilliant Italian minimalist, adds his own special electro-acoustic production touch to this album. The vocals of Juri Camisasca which sounded aimless and disjointed in Lino’s debut, surprisingly, work better in this decidedly more “electronic” environment. Opening track “Le Son De La Musique” really pinpoints some of the work of Cluster and Brian Eno, as turning points in sound. Some might poo poo L’Attesa for being less abstract but, personally, I love that Lino made an accessible version of the wayward minimalism he was carving out before. Hopefully, as you hear on tracks like “Ricordandoti”, “Echi Del Telaio Persico”, and “Radiofonic Song”, the only thing missing from this album is a more than necessary reissue of it. Sadly, released on hand-painted vinyl, in 1992 (talk about a double-whammy!), it was swept under the rug of history by the increasing CD format releases that were supplanting that supposedly “outdated” format. Anyway, you know what I think, good music is always worth that wait…
“Choose a physical scenario, and even before a mental one. Imagine a music, or rather a sound, and try to arrange it with the distant but never dormant memory of the echo of the silence of eternity. The train of the Cascais line passes fast and menacing alongside the road, from the side of the river: in the middle the trams COCA-COLA, PEPSODENT, CERVEJA SAGRES, rattle like beautiful old toys. On a Sunday morning a tram passes noisy and precarious, with an African princess sitting in the center, the only passenger of a can full of light: her light, her eyes and her clothes. The tram is already far away, little more than a red dot that will disappear in a moment. I lost the notion of time. I could hear drums, I saw only the palms on the side of the road and no longer the factories, the walls and the murals. Only the palm trees beaten by a south wind, dry and burning on my lips. A noisy and drunken company tries to kill me with a killing car. I jump just in time on the tramway track. The car continues to zig zag and I find myself thinking of the giant trucks that come out empty with engines that scream after having unloaded the goods at the General Markets, there in the round, towards the square. But, it’s Sunday morning. The whistle of the wind also goes out in my mind and the distant drums bring back the dream of the memory of the silence of the silence of eternity”
— Massimo Villa, Alfarim 1992 (translated excerpt, from liner notes to L’Attesa)