Six Minute War Madness – Il Vuoto Elettrico (Overdrive, 2024)

Italy during the 1990s was a rich territory for music lovers. Net of a certain amount of subjection for the U.S. and their vision of rock – Vinicio Capossela as our Tom Waits, Marlene Kuntz as our Sonic Youth, Bugo as our Beck Hansen, and so on – there were also bands that didn’t lack in originality. As an example CCCP Fedeli alla Linea during the previous decade were an intriguing post punk band, while Assalti Frontali tried with their album Conflitto to unite hip hop and hardcore punk. 

Not to mention Massimo Volume, whose music could be labeled after quite some years as post rock – while in effect since their beginning they were mixing spoken poetry and a music made of guitar progressions and experimental rhythms – or Afterhours, a band that gave life to an idea or rock music that was anthemic and noisy at the same time. From that last line up came out guitarist Xabier Iriondo, who after a couple of albums with Agnelli decided to follow also his own vision. 

A true cultural agitator, Iriondo gave life to bands like Six Minute War Madness, whose name came from a famous composition by The Pop Group, and A Short Apnea. Devoted to almost non idiomatic languages through his guitar, you can hear in his playing influences from noise, post rock and post punk, with an attitude to incarnate a certain malaise thanks to the lyrics by Federico Ciappini incarnating the existential aspect of the music you can listen through records like this new reissue, for the first time on vynil, of Il Vuoto Elettrico. 

If pieces like Dolores collect the tension, Lettere Dal Fronte at the opposite set it free even if with some attempt to liquify. A nice definition of their music can be “a massimalistic version of Steve Albini’s Shellac”. And if arpeggioes like those in Il Vuoto Elettrico with a spoken text superimposed are an open hommage to Emidido Clementi creature we talked here above, Una Novità seems to come out of Spiderland even if it doesn’t prevent the possibility of a catharsis. 

Originally issued by Jungle Sound in 1997, Il Vuoto Elettrico is a mature album that maybe would have deserved a greater interest. Unluckily, that was the year C.S.I. issued Tabula Rasa Elettrificata for their C.P.I. label and then disbanded after a successful tour, giving the impression to a superficial observer to take with them all the scene and the possibility of a wider recognition outside of the niche of the indie rock culture. 

In effect, hearing Ciappini claiming “I know, I know what I need” in Le Mie Streghe give us the sensation that this band had its own reason to be there and that once more alternative rock in Italy was realistic about its opportunities, and that maybe it was the political repression (see the G8 of Genova), even if SMWM wasn’t political in the strict sense of the word, to give a stop to creativity all over the country, or at least to oblige us all to reconfigure our lives and to direct ourselves once again, as it happened at the end of the 1970s, towards introspection. 

Alternating small bass and guitar textures as in Media 27 to more extroverted tirades like Neanche un Minuto (“I’m dying every night”), Il Vuoto Elettrico is an interesting photograph of a period of our musical culture where musicians like Paolo Cantù (guitars) and Daniele Misirliyan (drums) were trying to get rid of clichés placing themselves side by side with experimental hardcore bands like Fugazi (see Brucia). 

Issued by Overdrive Records, this version of Il Vuoto Elettrico will be welcomed on April 20, 2024 at 6.30 PM by a short live act at Dissonanze, a milanese record shop that in the future maybe will become in our present times what Iriondo’s Sound Metak was during the years that ended with his closing in 2011. A space in which to listen to good music, both on vynil and live, and exchange vibes and emotions. IF you’re in Milan this weekend, you know where to go now.