Futuro Antico – Futuro Antico (1980)

We’re all feeling it. That creeping sense that something is deeply, even fundamentally wrong. Let’s call it the “Post-Corona-Syndrome”. Technology, social media… tracking us on these fucking smartphones. Modern Western society embraced the promise and creeping of technology long ago- all this technology would soon “ease the burden of man”.

By now, we sense the pointlessness of that fallacy, and a surreal totalitarianism seems just around the corner. Not that this realization matters anymore. We are hurrying like mindless-drones in a hive, each of us absorbed with our individual work assignments, with no time to stop or think. Each of us responsible for a tiny widget in an unnamed, undefined unholy goal.

Futuro Antico (1980) strikes as a warm, progressive raga-drone alternative to the harsh assault of most electronic music being created today. Instead of the rip-your-head-off psycho beats of electronic music, Futuro Antico creates a jazzy vibe of endless human possiblities. This is experimental world music that was born of a collaboration between two Italian composers, Riccardo Singigaglia and Walter Maioli, and singer, guitarist and percussionist Gabin Dabiré of Burkina Faso.

Together the trio forges an alliance between experimental electronic music and traditional world music, exploring the collaborative journey between these two worlds. Much of the music itself is based on the hypnotic repetitive of Indian, Middle Eastern and African instrumentation and then processes that sound through the minimal, electronic and synthesized electronic sound.

It should be noted that many Western musicians employed this world music sound in the eighties (God help us… see Peter Gabriel’s SO or Paul Simon’s Graceland, if you must). Those albums never approached the brillant multidimensional sound of Futuro Antico, but were mostly creating an unfortunate and pretentious mix of sound that served only to extend the careers of those musicans running out of ideas of their own.

Only, something unique and beautiful happened for Future Antico. Instead of an the uncomfortable and dated sound created through a forced collaboration, Futuro Antico manages a rare trick- pointing the way toward new sonic territory that is full of ambient groove and easy, jazzy rhythms. Flowning electronic soundscapes that embrace a cosmic drone as the musicans weave together various modern and ancient sounds. It really shouldn’t work.

What is most important here? The instrumental experimentation and collaboration is mutual and natural, the sound quite remarkable once you catch the buzz. The music pouring out of the artists with honesty and passion for the fire they have ignited together.The music of Futuro Antico sounds like the creation of something genuinely new and groundbreaking, just listen to the magic created with “Ao-Ao”. Together the ancient and modern mix in a way that is almost never achieved. The sound seems to hang in the air all around us. We do indeed escape but not in a stupid drug haze, instead, we find the revelations and possibilities of what could be.

Here, technology is always serving the music and instruments to enhance the music, which is another way of saying that the technology is serving the musicans, serving the music. And this is an important distinction with other forms of progressive or electronic music in music. It’s the idea that music and science should serve the needs of man. Instead of being enslaved by technology, a civilization should be served by art, music, science and, indeed, even religion.

Futuro Antico finds a space were the traditional, avant-garde and electronic music ignite with a human voice. A strange, beautiful and mesmerizing album that points toward alternative ways of combining the traditional, spiritual, and technological: an antique future, indeed.

by Shawn Ciavattone