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Supermarket – Italo Barock(Q) (Releasedate: 14.06.2024)
Italo Barock(Q) is Supermarket’s second album following their debut album Portobello released as a limited edition by the Romagna-based label, L’amor mio non muore, in 2016. With Italo Barock(Q), Supermarket persistently perfects the art of reprocessing numerous genres considered “exotic,” which is a key element in the group’s musical research since its inception, employing a range of diverse and complementary approaches. After an initial period, characterized by extreme spontaneity, unpredictability of playing “live” and analogue recording, this latest album is instead an experiment in artificial and “in the box” production, entirely conceived, played and programmed by Alfredo Nuti in his home studio. Only later, following the suggestion of producer Alberto Fabris, was the album entirely transferred to tape and mixed by Fabris himself in analogue to then mastered by Tim Oliver at Top Cat Studios (? Real World Studios, UK). It is, afterall, computer science and virtuality that find themselves at the center of the post “something” imagination, which runs through the entire album, where excerpts of ancient dance music are exhibited in the form of corrupted audio files, digital glitches and met with Italian comedy soundtrack, rock’n’roll, and techno.The 8bit orchestration goes in search of South America and contemporary jazz; an unlikely, revived, guitar virtuoso seeks electronic dimension in interstellar space. At the other end, musical garbage: from the MIDI jingles that decorate our everyday lives in shopping malls, amusement parks, to elevator music, everything is reused and mixed into a hysterical soundtrack for non-places and androids who dream of being human.
Alfredo Nuti “dal Portone”: Composition, arrangements, sound design, lead vocals, electric, acoustic and MIDI guitars, vocoder, clarinets, Modular synthesizers & digital keyboards, field recordings, samplers,
Carlo Vallicelli : Acoustic drums, Percussions, backing vocals
Marcello “Jandu” Detti : trombones, tuba, euphonium, Polynesian shells, backing vocals
Supermarket were formed in 2010, initially as a side project of guitarist Alfredo Nuti “dal Portone” who has always been involved, in various roles, in the heart of italian independent music: Extraliscio, Pacifico, Shaloma Locomotiva Orchestra, Saluti da Saturno, Colombre, Jang Senato, Giacomo Toni, NicoNote, Antonio Ramberti, Granturismo, and many others. His name appears as session man or arranger in dozens of records and live collaborations, in a career that ranges from contemporary electronic to Liscio (typically Romagna folk), from South American music to krautrock, from garage punk to jazz, from pop to singer-songwriting. Supermarket, in fact, rather than identifying an actual band, is an artistic name that refers to various collectives of musicians and different artistic moments that have alternated over the years, in Romagna, under the artistic direction of Alfredo Nuti, characterized by a unique blend of kitsch exoticism and radical experimentation, beach parties and surrealist black humour. The “open” nature of this project and its establishment in the local music scene with tracks that have become “standards” to the public, has favoured the coming and going of an impressive number of musicians (twenty people, just among drummers and bassists!). A significant slice of the Romagna underground was able to find in this project a base camp for experimentation and collective fun, especially in the first live gigs: real wild performances, totally out of control, an always changing number of people on stage (from three to ten) and no time limit (from half an hour to four hours).
Among the founding principles of this oddity, known as “World Music Romagnola,” we find the decision to detach from a specific target, developing its sound directly through its own performances, guided by interactions with different venues and audiences each time. This resulted in a paradox: on one hand, an extraordinary and unexpected demand for concerts (almost a thousand in their career!) and on the other, Supermarket’s absence from official stages and major distribution channels, which, by their nature, require a decidedly more “structured” attitude to promotion and live events. In short: a hilarious, creative mess, impossible to manage and realistically, at that point, with few expectations. By mid-decade things began to change and it was time to give this turbulent process a less scattered and more recognizable style.
Today, after a long period of inactivity due to the pandemic, the project restarts trying to learn from this creative and, in some ways, unique history, while at the same time keeping in mind that the musical situation has drastically changed. For a few years (since approximately 2019) Alfredo Nuti has been conceiving solo his latest beast: “Italo Barock(Q). The result is a postmodern cyberfolk, rooted in the crisis of its own tradition, where even the dance sounds, at a deep level, hide a restlessness, an uneasiness, connatural to the new “Zombie” nature of the musical material being reused. To achieve the variety of sound needed for such an ambitious operation, the instrumentation has also evolved: along with drums, wind sections and electric guitars, now there are also MIDI guitars, modular synthesizers and old digital keyboards, drum machines, vocoders and samplers. Digital, analogue, and acoustic coexist without hierarchies of value, and the vocal parts, which till now had been excluded from an eminently instrumental project, become more numerous.
As for the live band, instead of the bedlam of musicians of the past, a dry electronic/acoustic trio was preferred, with two of the earliest Supermarket members: Carlo Vallicelli on drums and electronics, and Marcello “Gianduia” Detti on brass, acoustic percussion and Polynesian shells. It took ten years of gathering and focusing on their own prerogatives, but it is a bit as if Supermarket have just come to life, evolved, as they are, into something that certainly can no longer be called a “side project”. Luckily.
Single Visualizers
Algebra Waltz – https://youtu.be/dZs1vN1s0Mg
Ego Echo Trom – https://youtu.be/FlHcJmtR-I4
Medioman Polka – https://youtu.be/dSVLeoswd8U
TikiToko Megastore – https://youtu.be/AICsUM4bIGU
P.I.G.S. – https://youtu.be/OLda0mqeaxw
Brandeburger – https://youtu.be/uZkS3g9qApA
Ciao Ragazzi – https://youtu.be/6su_ckwrjb0
Fake Tropicalia – https://youtu.be/k8qOhKc6iZY
Ac(Q)uafun – https://youtu.be/CAF5LERz0oA
