Band : Io Monade Stanca
Album title : The Impossible Story Of Bubu
Label : African Tape Group
Distributor : Mandai Distribution
Release date : October 2009
Release : (Digipack) CD

According to the label’s (or rather distributor’s) info sheet: “Io Manade Stanca is a young group from Canale, Piedmont, Italy, Students of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist College Of Pataphysics. Edoardo Baima (vocals, guitar & bass), Nicolas Joseph Roncea (guitar & bass) and Matteo Romano (drums)…” and with this album they relate to us “…the impossible story of “Bubu”…”!

They were lucky enough to find Sacha Tilotta (drummer for Three Second Kiss and sound engineer for Uzeda) willing to record the 7 tracks for this almost 43-minutes album at the Redhouse studio in Senigalli during September 2008, and then had the recordings mastered for CD in March 2009. The band’s music is described as “…raw, with lolloping drums and resonating, guitars smattered with strained vocals and grotesque cries…music that is both the idiot and the savant…from Maps & Atlases to Big’n via Polvo, Dilute and Honey For Petzi, Io Monade Stanca create music that is technical, scientific, explosive and unique…”

Hum, thus far the label’s description…and I don’t know àny of the cited reference bands! But I càn tell you what I hear when listening to this band’s album. It’s like the guys play guitars with their amps as only distortion, giving ‘em a late ‘60s sound. There’s a freaky early ‘70s Teutonic Progressiveness in the angular way the guys play their instruments which apparently comes from a Jazz influence, and as far as the drums are concerned…it almost sounds like they were recorded in a room with the drums set up in one corner of a 5 by 10 m room, with only one mike at the other end to record ‘em. This adds (in a positive way) to the freakyness of the instrumentalists and the Dadaistically-styled vocals (part of which at least are done in English…I think…in spite of all song titles being in Italian). The whole would work pretty annoying, if it wasn’t for the fact that the guys incorporated several longer instrumental passages (during which the Progressive influence comes through most clearly) on the album.

Of course, from just goin’ on the words I put down above, you can hardly make a fitting image of what this band sounds like. To check with the words, surf to myspace.com/iomonedastanca, where the band posted 2 tracks off their new album alongside 5 other tracks (meanwhile, I found out that the trio’s been operative since early 2005, when Roncea joined Baima and Romano, replacing the guy they’d been fooling with before. That same year they recorded and released (September) the 3-track demo Monade Nomade, which was typified by an overall melancholic atmosphere, and apparently therefore didn’t go well. After an internal search the trio returns with new tracks which have somewhat irregular time signatures, and are rawer than previous material in spite of keeping the romantic touch from the demo tracks. At this time Roncea and Baima start exchanging instruments, making it possible to make twin guitar pieces. With the aid of Fuh guitarist Andrea Pisano, the band then records 4 tracks in March 2006 for a new demo. In May 2007, the band records its debut full-length In The Thermi Table, which is released through Cantalese*Noise Records in October 2008. After a couple of initial promotional gigs on home soil, the band then goes off on short abroad tours (Germany and Holland in March, France, Spain, Portugal, and again France in late April-beginning of May, and later in May they do Holland’s Delta Festival, and even pass through Belgium…Mons, to be exact) and continues their live assault from June on, playing festivals during Summer (I’ve no idea what they did later, as info is lacking). Originally, the band had planned to have The Impossible Story Of Bubu mastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston, but apparently that fell through (the job was eventually performed by one Maurizio Gianotti)…and now that Shellac has been name-dropped, there àre some (sóme) similarities in the music, wouldn’t you agree?