Welcome to “La terza estate dell’amore”, a free album that exudes freedom from all pores, like its author Marco Jacopo Bianchi better known as Cosmo.
“La terza estate dell’amore” is a fart in the face of those who deny the essentiality of the party and the spirit of community. We have no use for corpse cities, places of death of soul and body. We want to change them. Fuck the GDP, fuck the Stock Exchange.”
A record that moves, or rather goes straight to the future, accompanied by psychedelic sounds, rhythms more than animated, 12 tracks that will never make you bored. “La terza estate dell’amore” is the manifesto of something that still has no name. A pulsating and desiring body that sprays its sweat on the work ethic.
To understand something more or better enter even more into the complex universe of Cosmo, we had a chat to explain every track, from the first to the twelfth, none excluded.
Among confessions, turns in the productions, Cosmo has more or less summarized the process of realization that led him to publish his new album. La terza estate dell’amore is an invocation, more than a reality. It is a possibility, but also a necessity.
But first, if you haven’t already, listen to it, you won’t regret it.
Let’s start with the title “La terza estate dell’amore”. An album that is a manifesto, a representation of our era, a restitution of lost time, an invocation. It is an album, as you yourself wrote, that goes towards the future, but where does it want to go? What does it set out to do?
The record is just a record, something that you listen to and that becomes part of your life. For me, it was a work that I conceived, finished and send out. Then as to where it wants to go, you know, when you let something go it goes, I don’t think I have much control or ambition. The hope is that the musical message that I put in there will get through, which is that of free music. Whenever I did things, whenever I felt like I was breaking a rule or not forcing the song to follow a pattern, it was in those moments that I was okay. That’s something I’d like to see pass. That it would pass both in the body of the people listening but also in the head. If I have to find an ambition maybe it’s that this record will be a nice breath of freedom and inspire more freedom, that’s it. But also that other people can start taking this plunge.
Let me make a comparison, just to start our track by track in the best possible way. Can we consider “DUM DUM” a sort of intro like “Bentornato” in Cosmotronic? An intro that lets us know what kind of world you are about to let us into.
Yes, it really has the function of an introduction but, compared to “Bentornato”, it is a bit heavier. I think it’s the darkest and most experimental piece I’ve done so far, even as a structure, it doesn’t have a chorus at all, it doesn’t explode, it has this almost creepy, strange, dissonant ending. It was meant to be a beginning where a conflict, a tension is introduced right away. “DUM DUM” is this, it’s unresolved, it starts in a weird way, the kick drum starts and everything slows down, the lyrics are simple, “punchy” and then the ending fizzles out and leaves you a bit like that. “Welcome Back” was a more introductory piece, it was more of a stream of consciousness.
Antipop we thought of it a bit as a manifesto. In a scene where everyone is looking for the hit, the first place in the charts, can we say that you have always been at the opposite pole?
Yes, this time perhaps in a more explicit way. Then it was not always so, for example “L’ultima festa” was a piece born by partying with friends, fucking around at my house, then came out that stuff there and exploded a bomb that has taken cross the population. But what I wanted to say is that making hits is not the purpose, at least not mine, and neither should music be. Music is not a little number. If we want to try and quantify success, music means lasting, in the collective imagination, and not necessarily a hit that breaks through. What happens nowadays when everyone wants to make numbers and boast platinum records is only to burn you quickly. In the end you have to see what remains, how many of those songs remain. I prefer to make songs that stick with me, the fact of making a hit enslaves you musically, because you have to try to understand what the public will like, but it is wrong to make music thinking about this. I at best ask myself, “Will they understand it?”. What I try to do is to make myself understood, to bring people into my musical world.
If we think back to these months, music has been really illegal, you have tried with your voice to change some things, becoming promoter of important speeches. Can you explain us how this crazy psychedelic sounding track, which seems to sum up this last period, was born?
It is a hymn to parties, regardless of whether they are legal or not, let’s say. It’s a fact that music has become illegal, in the sense that it has become a problem with the pandemic. And so I set out to hymn the exact opposite. The idea was to make people want to throw or attend an illegal party.
When we use the term “Fresco”, it’s never done by accident. It’s sort of an absolute compliment. To us you are, maybe too much so, so we’d love to know the secret to Cosmo’s freshness.
[Laughs] I don’t know, I swear. Actually “Fresh” is dedicated to my wife. “You’re Fresh” is her, it’s a love song where I didn’t know what compliment to give. I was really trying to make a song that was fresh from a production standpoint, that had some surprises, some novelties. I found this word and I thought it was perfect, also because every now and then I say it to her. Personally, I try to keep myself fresh, for example without telling myself that at 39 I should be an adult, it’s something that makes you age. Children also have freshness, it’s acting and thinking like a child, and always enjoying everything. That’s what I try to do, I’m always behind organizing moments of conviviality, family parties, it’s something I like, something my parents did when I was little. Perhaps, then, to stay fresh you have to play, play a lot and be silly, something that we have lacked in this period.
Mango, on the other hand, is a super-charged piece, but one that exudes great lightness, like an ice cream in the middle of August. Why Mango? What was the idea behind the piece?
At the time, I had sketched out this production with the bass drum that instead of going straight went “bum bum bum”. The real turning point, however, came when my sister-in-law sent me a video of my son Carlo who had made himself with a filter singing “bando dichidi bando”, exactly with that little voice that you hear in the refrain. I heard it and thought “wow!”. I knew exactly where to put it. Maybe he was unknowingly trying to imitate Anna in the song “Bando”. The whole piece is dedicated to my son, I put his lightness in it, his crazy energy. Without wanting it, this stuff came out, playful, light, explosive like him. What you hear in the song is Carlo Adriano Bianchi.
In France there is a widely used proverb that goes like this, “You have to put the cathedral back in the center of the village”. “Cathedral” is the 6th track on the album out of 12, a coincidence we could have missed. Clearly the proverb has a very big intrinsic meaning, that after a period of loss then everything will return to its place.After 3 years of absolute silence, can we say that with this album you put everything back in its place?
Yes, let’s say that in this album I feel I’ve made a good synthesis between my musical path, which at one point was in mainstream pop, and my underground past. From my point of view, this record seems to be the one most centered on me, which I arrived at with a long work. Then, maybe in two years I’ll tell you no that record no, but right now I feel it is.Anyway, “Cathedral” actually ended up there in the middle, by chance. The piece is about sex, so pharmacy and cathedral were two elements, two metaphors that represented pain and pleasure, two components that I can never separate. I’m not a sadist, I liked to do a piece on sex with these terms here, where there is a game, where you enter. Exactly, behind the pharmacy you find the cathedral, right?
We come now to “Puccy bom.” Where does this strange title come from? And what does the single want to tell us in full, since in some parts you say, “how it will end not even God knows”.
Puccy Bom is a term that came up at random, improvising, it has no particular meaning, but I decided to keep it because it worked. It reminded me a bit of when you call your cat “Pucci Pucci”. The piece then is quite political, it talks about the social organization, the crisis in which it is and the conditions in which we found ourselves, a kind of cage. “How it will end not even God knows” is a reference to Fisher, to “Capitalist Realism” and the classic phrase is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Instead I reiterate that not even God knows what will happen in the future, in fact the piece ends with me whispering: “but capitalism blah blah blah”.We need to clear the future of any kind of pessimistic narrative and open it up to positive possibilities. That means we can take charge of our lives now and the pandemic has proven that. Now there is talk of modernizing this country, there is political will to address certain things, sustainability and so on. We will have to see, we will have to be vigilant, but the beautiful narrative that we will become extinct, that everything is bad, that everything sucks has taken a break.
As the eighth track we go “Out” from your album for a moment. In your stories, we’ve seen Pan Dan, an artist who has impressed us, now the only feat on the album is with Silvia Kostance. What can you tell us about them?
Nobody knows, but Silvia is a singer in an Italian-Spanish band called Dame Area, a cool band that I recommend. They’re from Barcelona, they come out of the industrial, experimental scene. I was immediately struck by her voice, her intonation, this out of tune, this very visceral, heartfelt way of singing.
Gundala, on the other hand, is a piece to let yourself go, to lose yourself in it.
“Gundala” is the way my son Pietro pronounced the word music as a child. He would actually say “Gundala Gundala.” I jotted this word down knowing that sooner or later I would use it. This piece is divided into two scenes, two separate parts. The first one I wrote in the studio during the first lockdown. Basically, when I left the house, I was about to cross the street and I saw my son waving at me from behind the window and I felt a terrible sadness seeing him locked in the house, so I wrote this, almost a declaration of love for him. Then the piece changed and the second scene was written after a cycling vacation in Trentino. I watched my son pedaling in front of me, I could only see the back of his head and I was moved, I feel like crying even now. Seeing him pedaling free, I was very moved.So that’s how the song ends indefinitely, the lyrics say so too if you’ve been paying attention.
The eleventh track is titled “Io ballo.” To echo what you say in the lyrics, “it’s a dance on the carcass of a society incapable of enjoying and organizing itself to be happy.” What can we do to be happy and get going again?
The answer is trivial, dancing (laughs ed.). Culturally that piece is a reference to the book by a sociologist friend of mine Enrico Petrilli, “Notti tossiche”, a collection of studies on artistic practices that can show that dancing, clubbing, is a form of micropolitics, a form of resistance to subjectivity in which the body is the battlefield. Clubbing and certain related rituals can be one of the antidotes of physical resistance to this kind of subjectivization. A subject who discovers himself to be in some way more fluid, as he moves his body, so in dance there is a subversive charge not to be underestimated, is almost dangerous. With the dance you bring into play, you evoke forces of over-excitement that are difficult to contain, they are frightening. The mass of over-excited people is scary, it’s a problem. And instead we have to push ourselves towards that thing.
We now come to “Vele al vento”. It’s such a free piece that we didn’t feel like caging it in a single question, so we’ll leave the field open for you, introduce it yourself.
Vele al vento is just that, after the initial conflict, towards the end of the record you get to a kind of peace with yourself and with the others. In Sails to the Wind the main thought was to open up the future. At one point I ask myself in the piece, “what were we doing 200,000 years ago?” because if you think about it, man has been around for a long time. It’s a way of asking: what are we really? What will we be? In the track I wanted to leave this sort of open journey, to clear the field of the future again. Then I liked the metaphor of the boat because sometimes I feel like I’m traveling at sea with someone who understands what I’m feeling, some reckless person like me who says: “boh let’s drop the moorings and go”. So it’s a piece like that, projected forward.
Unfortunately, everything has an end, and we have arrived at the 12th track, “We”, which closes the third summer of love. Why did you decide, after quite a bit of crooked case, to close the album so peacefully?
Because “Noi” is the resolution of the conflict, I mean in the album I underline different points of conflict, I criticize society a lot, I try to remove some contradictions. Instead in “Noi” there is empathy. The basis from which to start is to feel part of a whole and identify with the other, the opposite of what drives this society. So it’s a piece where there is an identification with all of nature and all that exists. Because eventually our body will dissolve, it does it daily indeed, we lose skin, hair or excrement. Our body is only crossed by a flow of energy and exchanges with matter that at some point will be definitive, as it was from the beginning, as it was before us. So, somehow we need to start feeling part of the whole, the solution to this crisis maybe is just that: to change course and move from conflict to an idea of society based on empathy, because we are empathic beings, and on that there is not shit to do.
