IANVA are finally back with a new miniCD whose length and concept follow the golden rule of the good old fashioned EP.
Four brand new songs – which will NOT be part of the next albums – testifying the current creative stage of the band.
A Southern Götterdämmerung bathed in the sun of the Mediterranean lands. It’s time for IANVA to strike your inner notes again. That’s what this band is for.
Today, “the West” is a conveniently undefined construct that – for several vague reasons – some people repeatedly insist must be “saved” and/or “protected”.
It is a pity that those who are now “assembling” and calling men and minds up, are also guilty of having inserted in the collective unconscious something that in the past the Old Europe had never known – even in its frequent darkest nights.
This alien thing is nothing but a new vulgarity of disposition, nature and character.
The great Scott Walker and the O.S.Ts of some old Italian “B movies” provided IANVA once again with good hints as to how to put forward their point of view and speak their mind.
This is IANVA’s way to say: “Sorry, but don’t count on us…”
L’OCCIDENTE (THE WEST)
Like the Northern hordes with their barbarian deities
Who mistook the marbles of Luni* for Rome,
Or the wandering feral Altaics from the East
Who founded empires to pasture their nags,
Or the plunderers from the South who chose themselves as the only lords
And invented a god for slaves and shepherds,
We have exhausted stomachs but we are hungry like hyenas
And we’re all heading to the Big Night that’s coming…
The graveyard of sunsets is the place where the sun is going to die
But when the storm is rising, you know,
The first to dare is the first to fall…
We delegate everything, even the act of being violent
But a war of wombs is catching us completely weaponless
Always under the supervision of that “political correctness”
Which is castrating us as much as to carry on
Trapped inside this circuit with no yesterday and no today,
Licking a couple of bones as the dogs do
I have no wish to act as a Possibilist
I’m only looking at
The Big Night that is now in sight…
The horizon swallows the day where the sun is going to die.
You know, I’ve lost all my hope to see the season of Mistral back again.
The horizon meets the wave where the wind is wearing out
I’m off to the open sea and beyond, but I see no shore….
Between Vladivostok, the ultimate land
And the Orkney Islands which are the tiara of the West…
Very suggestive, I know
But what’s the use of keeping the faith
When fearing for our own skin is the only faith left?
We persist in considering ourselves the pinnacle
But the most dead of them all is much more alive
Than those who by now have just one thing that’s “sacrum”** – the bone above their ass…
And suddenly the Big Night has become a Big Wall…
A wall deaf to all crying, a wall surrounding nothing –
The West is just a direction and nothing more.
And if the sun is going to die in its arms,
And now the time has come, please
Shield that Athenian Fire you know so well
From the wind that will blow…
* Luni = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luni%2C_Italy – according to a well known legend, the barbarian tribes coming from the north to plunder and conquer Rome arrived to Luni and mistook it for the Eternal City because of its marble caves….
** this is a pun, very hard to translate in English. The italian term for the “sacrum” is “osso sacro” (“holy bone”), and “sacro” is also the Italian word for “sacred”/”holy”. The phrase is meant as “the only holy thing that it’s left for them is the holy bone above their asses”.
Some of the devotional feasts of Southern Italy show beyond doubt how much a certain popular and Mediterranean expression of Roman Catholicism has preserved and internalized many characteristics of the pagan and archaic ceremonial spirit.
In this expression we see a particular physicality. It is a visual, tactile and sensory religiousness that is peculiar to the Greek/Roman world. It is furthermore, a form that is distant both from the desert heat where all monotheisms have their origins and from the icy rigours of Protestantism.
“Santa Luce Dei Macelli” is a 3-dimensional track to sink and dive into.
Among echoes of “mafia folk” and “funeral cabaret”, the listeners are invited to lose themselves in a world that IANVA know very well. It may even be revealed that an obstinate attachment to those traditions so readily disdained and slandered by the sort of “discount Enlightenment” so en vogue today can be interpreted as an ultimate and possible chance for cultural resistance.
SANTA LUCE DEI MACELLI (ST. LUCE OF THE ABATTOIRS*)
Slower and more oppressive than a vulture’s flight
The praying crowd moves forward like oxen to the slaughterhouse.
Let the Chorus in!
Let there be the light of a thousand candles to illuminate the path!
And just to touch the borders of the Holy vestment
As if it were a balm bringing great comfort,
Knees are dragging on the ground, leaving behind them a trail
Which is foamy and dark brown, like an agony
Her white breast among the thorns is like a riddled Golgotha
And her head is crowned by the stars of Ursa Major.
With her ivory and purple face she gazes down at us
Who stand amidst the ruins,
And it’s just for our sake that her heel tramples the Dreadful Snake.
But the bloodstained leg of the Vattiente**
Is insinuating a lesson that goes unheeded:
The meekness is not always a virtue,
Those who tame their suffering don’t want the slavery.
If the holy Cardo*** is an Act Of Contrition
Just like the 7 swords deeply sinking and drinking from her heart,
I can see the serene and virile heedlessness of the archaic hoplite
Who sacrifices himself….
And from the toothless mouths of old hags black as the night
The loud, panic wave of Ionian routes will resound.
The sacred frenzies of the Attic springs are rising inside of me
And those ecstatic wars begin to belong to me.
I can still feel the warm and smoking entrails between my fingers,
And through her I can perceive the mystic flights of birds of passage.
That’s why I hold this revolver, and if you ask me the reason
I’ll answer that the time has come again for us
To stand up and honour our Gods!
* Luce is the italian word for “light” but it’s also a girl’s name. So the title is a pun and could be also translated as “Holy Light Of The Abattoirs”.
** The “Vattiente” is a penitent, the holy flagellant who lashes himself on Easter Saturday in many villages and little towns of Southern Italy. The most famous of them are the “Vattienti” of Nocera Terinese you can see in “Mondo Cane” movie. The rite of the “Vattienti” (the fiagellants) at Nocera Terinese (in the province of Lamezia Terme, hometown of IANVA’s female singer Stefania) which has survived the centuries, is both dramatic and moving. This rite takes place on Easter Saturday: groups of penitents who have received grace, their heads encircled by a crown of thorns, lash their flesh with slivers of glass applied to a waxed cork called a cardo.
*** The “Cardo” is a big cork disk with 13 nails and/or slivers of glass used by the Vattiente to lash his legs and chest.
The simple and harmonious chords of “The Battle” – an evergreen written and performed by The Strawbs – combined with the narrative structure particular to the original version (showing almost kinship in terms of progress to the stations of the cross) provided IANVA with great material for an “Italian” transcription and a re-arrangement of a masterpiece that, as far as we know, has been never covered before. They also provided the chance to do a sort of prequel to “Disobbedisco!” and fix the exact moment when Maggiore Renzi breaks into Giovanni Laurago’s life – during the most feverish phases of the bloody battle of Mount St. Gabriele, in May 1917.
Oddly enough, the stages of the battle described in the original Strawbs’ song vividly call to mind the events IANVA chose to relate. This allowed the band to preserve the dramatic escalation of the original version and its bitter final annotation.
This no mere cover, but rather a respectful re-telling of events that loses nothing in the translation.
IN BATTAGLIA (IN BATTLE *)
6 o’clock A.M. – altitude: no, I don’t remember.
The reinforcements hold their bridgehead
With the frost in their veins.
By a train full of rain they reached the top
Up to the mouth of the grindstone that pulverises Youth.
High above our heads, like a giant mosquito
An aircraft takes measurements to build future coffins:
It examines us enough to turn and fly away
But not before shooting its artifice like fireworks.
7 o’clock A.M. – altitude: we’re still here.
From the ridges above somebody starts to tune his instruments
For a concerto à la Viennese
With guns and tracer bullets.
And here already there’s a soldier who takes his leave…
From his legs.
Even the least religious of us commends his soul to God
Hoping perhaps he’ll grant the gift of invisibility.
But it’s from the sky that the hammer comes down,
Breaking our trenches and flushing the dead out, just to clarify our ideas…
The deadly putrefaction is surfacing from the moor,
Not a bad memento at all, given the time to think about it.
But now their storm troops are swarming with a perfect sense of timing.
And that bloody barbed wire has almost torn off!
No sooner said than done the Austrian troops break through the recruits.
– As always, the greenhorns are fucked! –
And though gallantly they fight, their inexperience condemns them
While a rush from “Our Friend Fritz” routs them in no time at all.
The chronicles will call it a “retreat”, but we cowardly took flight
With the landsturmer at our heels, that hellish thing!
When an advance troop of Arditi loom suddenly out of the fog,
It rallies all ranks and the chapter is not done yet!
The enemy’s post is too advanced, they’re losing cover.
Yet they want to hold the new ground if they can.
But only arrogance believes they’ll overrun
The wolf that turns to spring again.
A cloud of grenades reminds them that Arditi never skimp on bullets!
Our daggers are hot on their heels, upsetting their ranks.
Now we come as the scythe and they’re the wheat to reap.
The old blind chaplain wanders among the butchered corpses,
Among the holes and the stink of cordite laced hemoglobin.
Blue-grey** or grey-green**: he makes no distinction
Giving his sad blessing to all.
Finally we manage to break through, repaying them in the same coin
We conquered the mountain that swallowed half our Army!
From this very early morning 20.000 left their bones here,
Returning us exactly to the spot we held 48 hours ago.
* English translation of the Italian version, not the original one.by The Strawbs
** The colours of the uniforms of Austrian Army and Italian Army.