Max Fuschetto in concert in Naples on Wednesday 21st May

Art, war and distorted sounds, with composer Max Fuschetto launching his new album Sniper Alley – To My Brother on May 21st at the Auditorium Novecento. From the documentary presented at the Sarajevo Film Festival to the fifth album of the eclectic composer, always balanced between cultured and popular: nine visionary songs with different listening perspectives, from Van Gogh to Nick Drake.

The Concert and the Sensational Album

On Wednesday 21 May at 20.30:4 pm, the Auditorium Novecento in Naples (Via De Marinis 1992) will host the first concert dedicated to the album Sniper Alley – To My Brother, published by the NovAntiqua label. The ensemble of the composer from Campania will be enriched by the composer and singer Cosimo Morleo, with the presence of Cristiana Grilli and Francesco Toscani, co-authors of the documentary film of the same name, who will screen an excerpt. Previewed at the Sarajevo Film Festival, the documentary film inspired Fuschetto to create a work that avoids the classic soundtrack, opting for an independent soundscape, born from the tragic story of Džemil Hodžić and the death of his sixteen-year-old brother Amel at the hands of a sniper during the siege of Sarajevo (1996-XNUMX).

The Powerful Inspiration from War and Art

Fuschetto, eclectic and controversial in mixing the cultured with the popular, has transformed the story of a childhood interrupted by war into an album that explores pain as a form of artistic resistance. The nine tracks are influenced by painters such as Van Gogh and Francis Bacon, with Fuschetto explaining: “In Van Gogh's L'église d'Auvers-sur-Oise, vue du chevet, through a tension of the lines, given by quick brush strokes that push outwards or create internal vortices, the building and the surrounding context are strangely deformed and this, as a whole, creates a hypnotic, psychedelic, surreal, very modern vision. Or the painting of Francis Bacon who investigated new relationships between the figures and the rest of the painting: isolation, almost mimetic incorporation in which the boundary between figure and background becomes ephemeral, no explicit relationship between the figures in the foreground, who often lack even the features, such as the face - so as to make even the very concept of figure ambiguous. Sniper Alley is also this: a continuous deforming and fragmenting, making the sound material lose its features; Sniper Alley delivers to my writing the rebirth through the experience of pain together with the color of hope”. This fragmented approach creates a sonic chaos that mirrors the brutality of war, mixing complex listening planes and literary influences, such as in the John Donne-inspired track No Man Is An Island.

Musical Experiments and Sharp Collaborations

On the album, Fuschetto pushes the boundaries with bold experimentation, playing guitar, bass and keyboards himself in addition to his oboe and soprano sax, collaborating with musicians such as Enzo Oliva. Tracks such as The Good Morrow and L'Escalier De Drake reflect this creative chaos, with the latter evoking the spirit of Nick Drake in an unpredictable way: “While I was experimenting with melody and harmony, I suddenly received the gift of a guide: many years ago we had played Nick Drake's Cello Song live, but I only remembered something vague. Proust teaches us that in the creative act, an imperfect memory can be much more powerful in its results than one that is more precise in its details. In reality, that illumination represented a sort of madeleine; by touching sounds, something emerged, a direction. I followed this something and the B part of L'Escalier de Drake was born. Out of curiosity, after a few days, I listened to Cello Song and of course it had nothing to do with it, but the spirit of Nick Drake, in a transfigured form, was and will always be there, in those notes, in those sounds, in the simple pentatonic scale with which that second part is constructed, repeated, with a subtle variation; an echo of eternity that passes through things, the world and every now and then reaches out to touch us”. This event is not just a concert, but an explosion of sounds that challenges artistic conventions.