If 2020 had turned out differently, the debut album by Il Quadro di Troisi might have been the perfect soundtrack to the arrival of breathless exchange students in Italy’s ornate university cities, its winsome synth-pop spilling out of the headphones of homesick young people sharing flirtatious guidebook sentences with mysterious, well-dressed locals. In the absence of foreign travel, Il Quadro di Troisi—a collaboration between Italian electronic artists Eva Geist and Donato Dozzy—does the hard work for us, conjuring up the head-spinning beauty of Italy’s architecture and the effortless elegance of its nightlife.
Geist (aka Andrea Noce) and Dozzy (Donato Scaramuzzi) are both excellent producers in their own right, behind everything from wobbly psychedelia (Geist’s 2019 Urban Monogamy EP) to body-slamming acid (Dozzy’s 2018 LP Filo Loves the Acid) to heady ambient techno (Scaramuzzi’s mind-bending duo Voices From the Lake). But nothing in their catalogs has suggested they might be capable of producing pop as lush and poised as “Il Giudizio,” a song shot through with an irresistible twinge of melancholy and glamour, like sorrow between silk sheets.
Noce’s vocals, in particular, are a revelation. She sings the way Venice must surely look after a late-night heartbreak, all gloriously dusted beauty and elegant sighs. On “Real” her voice soars to the rafters like a startled bird; on “Sfere di Qi” it is shot through with tension; on “Non Ricordi” it drips with erotic charge. Scaramuzzi’s production, meanwhile, draws on Italy’s small but perfectly formed history of Italo disco and synth pop, all dreamy synth lines and discerning machine rhythms; their graceful tick is like an enigmatic stranger’s tantalizing offer to dance, rather than the relentless mechanical pester of contemporary dance music.
The shadow of Ennio Morricone’s exquisitely textured soundtrack work haunts Il Quadro di Troisi’s arrangements, adding sumptuous flesh to Scaramuzzi’s electronic skeleton. Pietro Micioni, of Italian indie label Twilight Music, contributes a wonderfully spidery guitar line to “Il Giudizio” that pushes the song into full ecstatic melancholy, like a rural reprise of the Sabres of Paradise’s classic “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix).” “Sfere di Qi” introduces lilting flute to a synth that coils around Noce’s vocals like a predatory python, suggesting early Kraftwerk if Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider had grown up on the banks of the Tiber. And Tommaso Cappellato adds the lightest dusting of live drums to “Raggio Verde,” his fine-drawn cymbal strikes upping the song’s organic texture by fractional—but important—degrees. These are pop songs for weary adults, which sacrifice the impulsive neon glare of modern production for a comforting pastel glow, their subtly layered charms emerging on sustained plays like ruins from the Neapolitan dirt.
Il Quadro di Troisi’s gloriously evocative touch leaves them in elevated company. If Air represent a guidebook glimpse of France, swapping mundane reality for the ornate grandeur of their native Versailles, then Il Quadro di Troisi do the same for Italy, their florid synth adventures painting pictures of a country so impossibly debonair it could only exist in our dreams. The album was born of a correspondence between Scaramuzzi and Noce about the late actor and director Massimo Troisi, best known for his outsider comedies, but it feels closer to Fellini's vision of Rome in La Dolce Vita: a work of pure creative opulence.
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