TORMAENTOSA
Being part of the masses or leading the masses?
Following the crowds or creating the rules to tame them?
Surfing the waves of trends or being squashed by them?
Climbing the pile or waiting for the growth to devour it?
Influencing the moltitudes or let them wipe out the moltitude of ideas?
Celebrating the Cult of Pack or unpacking the blind Faith?
Embracing the mass madness or getting mad in your own clarity?
Joining the hivemind to float in the tide of mindless bias
or preserving the vessel of Self to keep the Tought alive?
Although, in the end, it doesn’t matter what kind of group you think to belong to.
The man-defining challenge lies in belonging to humankind and sharing its collective isolation.
Following the crowds or creating the rules to tame them?
Surfing the waves of trends or being squashed by them?
Climbing the pile or waiting for the growth to devour it?
Influencing the moltitudes or let them wipe out the moltitude of ideas?
Celebrating the Cult of Pack or unpacking the blind Faith?
Embracing the mass madness or getting mad in your own clarity?
Joining the hivemind to float in the tide of mindless bias
or preserving the vessel of Self to keep the Tought alive?
Although, in the end, it doesn’t matter what kind of group you think to belong to.
The man-defining challenge lies in belonging to humankind and sharing its collective isolation.
THE RESOUNDING ROAR OF POWDER
In the era of erratic streaming and one-hit wonders, listening to a whole hour of music and being able to enjoy and grasp its conceptual coesiveness sounds like a sort of outfashioned pretentiousness. Still, thanks to its bolder scope, the format of concept album has got more meaningful than ever. Even more for my personal way of conceiving artistic expression as an existential statement against the "plateau effect" of the industrial massification of culture and imagination reinforced by the "instant" web phenomena of trend topics and influencers.
After releasing my previous album "EmPathmos", revolving around the invincible shipwreck of the empath looking for a pre-rational connection with his peers, I felt like a natural segue dedicating my new opus to wider themes such as omologation, mass desires and the irrational quest for power.
In his seminal 1960 book "Crowds and power", Elias Canetti described the formation of crowd as a momentary annihilation of identity provoked by the reversal of the fear of being touched. Thus people tend to form open crowds, aimed to a neverending growth, and closed crowds, whose purpose is the self-preservation by repetition over time. Both types derived by the crucial event of "discharge", a massive as well as delusive moment of relief during which everyone feels equal, until the disintegration of mass itself. Despite its apparently simplistic nature, this musing could be a valid analysis of the contemporary dynamics of society, ruled by chaotic waves of prejudices, irrational beliefs, fears and paranoia boosted through politics, religions, online groups and blogs. Last year, while cycling along a desert road in a misty afternoon , I heard a furious roar coming from the countryside. In a few seconds I realized it was the resounding uproar of a crowd attending a soccer match. According to Canetti, that collective scream symbolizes the "discharge" disintegrating the identity and amalgamating the individuals in the instictive unity of the mass.
That's the reason the album "Tormaentosa" and its title track are opened and punctuated by the screams of that invisible "Juggernaut" I've recorded on the roadside. Out of the reverbs of those roars, notes and lyrics dripped like droplets of a catartic cry of a lonely soul swimming in the drool of a colossal shapeshifting berserker.
