VA - 2012 - New Wave Italiana 1980-1986 2xCD

 

Spittle Records – spittle29  1.01GB FLAC

The cover turns the Italian underground into a machine. Thirty-four artist names are printed across the face of a small black-and-yellow keyboard as though each band were a switch, dial, oscillator or hidden circuit within one national instrument. Gaznevada, Neon, Pankow, Diaframma, Monuments, Central Unit, Jeunesse d’Ivoire, Rinf, Rats and the others are not arranged as portraits of individual stars. They become functions inside a larger device. Press one key and Bologna lights up. Turn another dial and Florence begins transmitting. Move further across the panel and Milan, Parma, Turin, Ancona and other local worlds enter the signal. The design offers an unusually accurate theory of a compilation: no track provides the whole system, but every track changes what the machine is capable of producing.

New Wave Italiana 1980-1986 is not a clean national canon assembled after the winners had become obvious. It is a crowded recovery operation. Across thirty-five tracks, Spittle Records gathers musicians who passed through post-punk, minimal electronics, mutant funk, synth-pop, industrial rhythm, darkwave, art-school theater and forms of dance music that had not yet settled into dependable categories. Some artists developed substantial histories; others left behind a single or a few difficult-to-find records. The anthology’s value lies partly in refusing to pretend that historical importance was distributed fairly. A band could possess imagination, urgency and a remarkable song while lacking distribution, press attention, money or the few connections required to continue.

The years in the title begin after punk had already broken the cultural furniture but before the new pieces had been assigned permanent names. Italian musicians were hearing records from Britain, Germany and the United States, absorbing Joy Division, Public Image Ltd., Devo, Talking Heads, the Residents, industrial music, disco, funk, electronic composition and the expanding possibilities of affordable synthesizers and rhythm machines. The obvious critical accusation is imitation, and portions of the anthology certainly reveal artists wearing imported influences close to the skin. Much of the singing is in English. Certain basslines, guitar tones and vocal gestures announce their foreign reference points immediately. But influence is not the same as passive duplication. These sounds entered Italian cities, local studios, regional rivalries, political histories and bodies with different habits. Even failed imitation produces mutations.

That tension gives the compilation its nervous energy. The musicians often sound simultaneously provincial and international, hungry to escape the limitations of the national market while building intensely local communities. They wanted to participate in a conversation taking place in London, New York, Sheffield, Düsseldorf and elsewhere, but they were working with the equipment, rooms, personalities and infrastructure available to them. The gap between aspiration and resources became part of the sound. Thin drum machines, cheap keyboards, blunt tape edits and oddly balanced mixes do not necessarily signify incompetence. They document people learning to construct a future before a professional industry had decided the future was commercially safe.

Gaznevada’s “Going Underground [2]” is a perfect ignition point. The track appears briefly, almost as a fragment or broadcast identification, but Gaznevada carry the mythology of Bologna’s post-punk transformation inside them. They had emerged from the more confrontational Centro d’Urlo Metropolitano and moved toward electronics, funk and metropolitan artificiality. Their appearance introduces a recurring question: what happens when punk’s refusal is redirected into the dance floor? The answer throughout the compilation is never simply pleasure. Dance becomes estrangement, parody, social observation and technological fascination.

Neon’s “My Blues Is You” stretches this condition into a six-minute nocturnal environment. The title joins emotional tradition to synthetic method. “Blues” suggests confession and historical weight, but the sound is built from electronic repetition, cool surfaces and controlled desire. Neon were central to the Florentine network, and their music demonstrates how the supposedly cold machine could become intimate without imitating acoustic warmth. The rhythm does not conceal loneliness. It gives loneliness a body capable of moving.

Pankow’s “God’s Deneuve” follows with a title that fuses divinity, cinema, glamour and absurdity. The band’s own Maurizio Fasolo later remembered the production as a compromised, overworked creation that failed to match what they imagined. That dissatisfaction is valuable evidence. Historical anthologies often freeze a recording as a definitive achievement while the people who made it remember arguments, errors and frustrated intentions. The listener receives the artifact after its failures have become style. What may have felt like an unwieldy “Italian mess” during production can later sound like the unstable birth of a language.

Carmody’s “The Perfect Beat” presents another central fantasy of the period. The perfect beat is both a technical object and an impossible social promise. Drum machines offered repetition without exhaustion, an exact pulse around which musicians could reorganize performance. Yet perfection immediately became vulnerable to human choices, studio limitations and emotional excess. The track also contains an early appearance by Max Casacci, later associated with Subsonica, showing how these small projects fed musicians into later forms of Italian electronic and alternative music. The underground was not a sealed tomb. Its personnel, methods and unfinished ideas continued travelling.

Diaframma’s “Pioggia” changes the compilation’s emotional temperature. The Italian title, meaning rain, immediately places language and atmosphere closer to home. Diaframma became one of the crucial names in Florence’s darker rock culture, and “Pioggia” demonstrates why singing in Italian could produce a different gravity from adopting English as the imagined language of modernity. The words do not need to disguise their origin to enter post-punk space. Rain becomes local weather, emotional climate and repeated texture. The song does not imitate British gloom so much as discover that Italian streets can generate their own.

Hi-Fi Bros and N.O.I.A. push the collection toward mutant funk and machine pop. “Punto Amaro” may divide listeners, but disagreement is part of the anthology’s usefulness. A serious historical compilation should not behave like a playlist engineered to remove every abrasive or embarrassing decision. Awkwardness reveals what the period allowed musicians to attempt. N.O.I.A.’s “The Rule to Survive (Looking for Love)” is more immediately convincing, combining physical rhythm with a title that makes romance sound like an emergency protocol. Survival and desire become linked because the dance floor is both social refuge and marketplace of exposure.

Pale TV’s “Teutonic Knight” captures the era’s fascination with a stylized Northern Europe. The title invokes German severity through an Italian project whose formation itself inverted common rock expectations, with women handling the instruments and a male singer at the front. The track’s “Teutonic” pose is not an authentic national identity but a costume assembled from imported imagery. New wave repeatedly permitted musicians to use clothing, gender presentation, names and accent as components of composition. Identity could be manufactured with the same deliberate artificiality as a synthesizer tone.

Chromagain’s “Wake Up” and Monuments’ “Oblivious” move into colder, more spacious territory. Monuments allow seven minutes for repetition to become architecture, their elegant restraint suggesting that minimal synth was not simply a scarcity of equipment. Reduction could be an aesthetic discipline. A narrow pattern, carefully sustained, alters the listener’s scale of attention. Each adjustment becomes structural, and emotional meaning is produced through persistence rather than dramatic change.

State of Art’s “Dantzig Station” converts European geography into an imagined transit system. Stations recur throughout post-punk because they are ideal modern spaces: temporary, impersonal, crowded, lonely and organized by departures. The band name itself treats music as a claim about the present, but the track sounds haunted by routes extending outside Italy. The generation documented here often seemed to live mentally in several cities at once. They were physically inside Bologna, Florence or Milan while transmitting toward Berlin, Paris, London and New York.

Central Unit’s “Saturday Nite” introduces a deliberately ordinary pop occasion into this network of intellectual references and bleak atmospheres. Saturday night is the promised zone where work, social regulation and weekday identity loosen. Yet electronic repetition can make leisure feel programmed. The party becomes another system entered on schedule. This ambiguity runs throughout the anthology. The musicians are attracted to popular culture, clubs, fashion and media while remaining suspicious of the conformity those systems can manufacture.

The names 2+2=5 and Luc Orient announce two different approaches to constructed identity. One invokes Orwellian false arithmetic, the political enforcement of an impossible answer. The other sounds like a fictional person or an exotic consumer product. “Incontrando Mc. L.” and “Night in Paris” turn these names into small theatrical worlds. New wave allowed bands to behave like temporary conceptual organizations rather than lifelong brotherhoods built around traditional rock authenticity. A name could be a slogan, equation, corporation, character or art prank.

Stupid Set’s “Hear the Rumble” is one of the first disc’s most revealing collisions of experimentation and dance pressure. Their work grew from cut-up thinking, electronic parody and a fascination with the Residents, but the track also understands the physical persuasion of an extended groove. The rumble is low-frequency warning, distant machinery and the arrival of a crowd. It approaches the dance floor from underground rather than from the bright entrance of commercial disco.

Surprize closes the first disc with “Leaves Me Blind,” an appropriate endpoint for a sequence filled with visual language, artificial light and technological optimism. Modernity promises expanded perception, then overwhelms the senses. To be surprised is to encounter what one’s existing system cannot process. The first disc has repeatedly staged that encounter, moving among acts polished enough for club circulation and others that sound like prototypes escaping the workshop.

The second disc opens with Jeunesse d’Ivoire’s “A Gift of Tears,” one of the anthology’s most immediately affecting songs. The French band name and English title create another cosmopolitan mask, but the emotion exceeds the styling. Tears are framed as a gift, something pain gives rather than merely extracts. The track’s cool surface does not suppress feeling. It protects feeling from becoming theatrical confession. Italian darkwave often reached its strongest moments when elegance and hurt were allowed to remain in tension.

Other Side’s “Central” and La Maison’s “5-2-5 Pausa Stop” emerge from the Milan scene with a more skeletal, urban intelligence. “Central” suggests a location, controlling system or core that may no longer exist. La Maison compresses numbers, pause and stop into a tiny piece resembling instructions printed on a machine. The two tracks demonstrate how musicians were learning to think compositionally through editing, interruption and information. A song did not need to unfold naturally. It could behave like a device receiving commands.

Rats’ “C’est Disco” is one of the anthology’s most delightful acts of teenage sabotage. The group members were extraordinarily young, roughly fourteen to seventeen, and built the piece around a bassline looped with physical tape on a Revox. They removed guitars and used synthesizer partly to mock the commercial disco environment and its carefully groomed emptiness. The repeated phrase “We only wanted to be loved,” borrowed from Public Image Ltd.’s “Fodderstompf,” turns the parody inward. Beneath the contempt for superficial club culture is the adolescent need for recognition. The joke works because the mockers and the mocked share the same hunger.

X-Rated’s brief unreleased demo “Blockhead Dance” preserves the rough edge that polished retrospectives usually remove. At less than two minutes, it resembles an extracted rehearsal impulse rather than a monument. Lisfrank’s “It’s Life” follows with a more developed electronic melancholy, illustrating the distance between a sketch and a fully inhabited synthetic space. The anthology gains depth by allowing both scales to coexist.

Intelligence Dept.’s “Anger Inside” gives the scene’s controlled surfaces an explicit emotional source. Anger does not need to erupt as punk shouting. It can remain compressed within bass, rhythm and repetition, becoming more dangerous through restraint. Rinf’s “Mexico” then breaks the neat categories again through an eccentric combination of nervous guitar, electronics and trumpet. Some listeners find it excessive, but excess is precisely its historical information. Rinf were not trying to perfect an established format. They were testing how many incompatible impulses the format could survive.

Plath’s two short pieces, “I’m Strange Now” and “Proletarian Submission,” arrive like pamphlets slipped between longer records. Their titles join personal alienation and political identity, yet the brevity prevents either idea from becoming a lecture. They recall a period when underground music remained close to small magazines, flyers, performance art and theoretical fragments. A song could function as a compressed statement without pretending to resolve its subject.

Dens Dens’ “Meaning of Words” returns to funkier territory, using electronic and conventional instrumentation in unusually balanced proportions. The title is apt for a compilation in which English, Italian, French references, invented names and technological terms constantly collide. Words communicate, but they also advertise affiliation. Singing in English could express international aspiration, alienation from Italian convention, or simple love for imported records. Singing in Italian could signal cultural confidence, intimacy or refusal. The meaning of words depended upon who was listening and where.

Redox’s “My Memory” introduces remembrance directly into a collection made possible by archival recovery. Memory is not a neutral storage device. It emphasizes, edits, romanticizes and forgets. Spittle’s project does not recreate the early 1980s exactly as participants experienced them. It constructs a new listening object in 2012 from surviving evidence. Songs that once seemed marginal can become central; tracks musicians disliked can acquire admirers; regional rivalries can be folded into a national story that did not fully exist at the time.

Illogico’s “Abilità Motoria” brings the body back into the machine. Motor ability is the capacity to coordinate movement, but the title can also suggest a mechanical motor learning human gesture. Degada Saf’s “Zom Africa” adds another imagined geography, revealing how readily new wave borrowed signs from elsewhere. Such references may now feel uncomfortable or naïve, but erasing them would make the history cleaner than it was. The underground was capable of insight and exoticism, freedom and imitation, critical intelligence and fashionable confusion.

Le Masque’s “Mother and Son” creates a rare familial image within a field dominated by nightclubs, stations, systems and altered identities. Family interrupts the fantasy of total self-invention. Every young modernist arrives from older relationships, inherited language and domestic structures that cannot be escaped merely by changing clothes or buying a synthesizer. The track’s emotional reserve makes that connection more powerful. It does not explain the relationship. It leaves the two figures facing one another across the arrangement.

A.T.R.O.X.’s “New York Race Track / 20” treats New York as speed, competition and numerical system. The city had become an immense symbolic generator for European underground musicians, representing no wave, clubs, galleries, danger and media acceleration. Yet the imagined New York inside an Italian recording is not the actual city. It is a mental instrument used to alter local possibilities. The fantasy matters because it encouraged people to make work their immediate surroundings had not requested.

Endless Nostalgia’s “Me and My Alter Ego” becomes almost prophetic inside a 2012 retrospective. Nostalgia is endless because every recovered era generates another image of itself. The original musicians created alter egos to escape ordinary identity; decades later, archival culture creates a second alter ego for the entire scene, presenting it as “Italian new wave” to listeners who may hear more unity than participants ever felt. The collection knows this danger and partly escapes it through abundance. Thirty-five tracks refuse one simple definition.

Baciamibartali’s “The Prediction” and Davai Ciass’s “Châtelet - Les Halles” close the set in states of anticipation and transit. A prediction points toward a future that may or may not arrive. Châtelet-Les Halles is an enormous Paris interchange where routes intersect beneath the city. Ending there makes the compilation feel less like a sealed national history than a station inside a larger European network. These artists were always listening outward, sending signals across borders and receiving transformed signals in return.

The anthology’s most interesting debate concerns whether this music represents a distinct Italian achievement or a delayed reflection of Anglo-American innovation. Both answers can be true without canceling each other. Some tracks cling visibly to foreign models. Others transform those models through local absurdity, melody, theatricality and technological limitation. But originality should not be judged solely by whether an influence can be identified. Cultural life depends upon translation. A form moves, enters new bodies and develops accents it did not possess at its origin.

What matters most here is the freedom of the attempt. Participants remembered the era as disorganized, anarchic, naïve and open to high theory, pop consumption, video art, fast food, punk, McLuhan, Joy Division and electronic optimism all being swallowed together. The boundaries had not hardened. Someone with a Sonic Six, Polymoog and eight-track recorder could filter amateur energy into a strange new pop language. Teenagers could make a tape loop and discover a method that sounded prophetic later. Independent labels could operate as temporary bridges between isolated groups.

The compilation’s unevenness is therefore not a flaw to be corrected. It is the shape of the historical field. A perfectly curated sequence containing only acknowledged masterpieces would suggest that the scene knew which ideas would survive. This collection preserves uncertainty. One track may sound fully realized, the next ridiculous, the next eerily advanced, and another inseparable from its period. That variation allows listeners to feel culture being invented rather than merely consume its successful results.

Spittle Records performs more than nostalgia by gathering these recordings. The label restores the connective tissue that commercial history discarded. Major narratives usually retain the artists who crossed into lasting recognition, while the smaller groups become anecdotes, collector objects or names printed in old fanzines. Here they are returned to proximity. A forgotten single can stand beside Diaframma or Neon without being treated as a footnote. The machine on the cover needs every dial.

Placed within this archive sequence, the compilation becomes another demonstration that meaning expands through adjacency. After COH’s digitally precise songs and disembodied voices, this sprawling Italian collection reveals an earlier generation learning to place human anxiety inside machines. The technologies differ, but the impulse continues. Electronics are used to manufacture alternate selves, communicate across distance and convert alienation into a shared physical rhythm.

New Wave Italiana 1980-1986 does not finally define Italian new wave. Its achievement is more generous. It reveals a crowded territory where definitions were being fought over in real time. The artists wanted to leave the past, escape national restrictions, join international modernity, mock commercial culture, enter it, dance, experiment and be heard. They often contradicted themselves because the future they desired had not yet developed rules.

The keyboard on the cover remains playable in the imagination. Each name is a control whose function becomes clear only after it is activated. No single setting produces the truth of the period. The complete picture emerges through alternation: elegant beside crude, famous beside nearly forgotten, Italian beside English, guitar beside sequencer, provincial room beside imagined world capital. The instrument is historical, but it does not sound dead. Thirty-five switches are still waiting for another hand.