Area’s rhythm section plays on two of the seven tracks here. Tavolazzi and Capiozzo had walked out while the record was being made, and rather than wait, the band filled the holes with other people: Hugh Bullen on bass, Walter Calloni on drums, Steve Lacy on soprano saxophone, Paul Lytton on percussion, a string trio, two Basque players on txalaparta, and somebody on kazoo. The result is the most extreme thing they ever put on a studio album, and it is built on a science fiction story about a bank that loses the human race’s memory.

The short version

Maledetti (Maudits) is Area’s fifth album, released in 1976 on Cramps, recorded at Fono-Roma in Milan, produced by the band. Thirty-nine minutes, seven tracks. Stratos sings and plays Hammond, piano, bells and percussion; Fariselli plays synthesiser, electric piano and prepared piano; Tofani plays electric guitar, guitar synthesiser and objects. Tavolazzi and Capiozzo appear on Gerontocrazia and SCUM. The guest list is long and serious — Lacy, Lytton, Bullen, Calloni, Eugenio Colombo, the Arze brothers, a violin, viola and cello. It is the last studio album with Tofani on guitar. Discogs files it under free jazz, avant-garde and free improvisation, which is closer to the truth than fusion.

Il plasma liquido

The sleeve notes lay out the concept and it is worth quoting the shape of it. A project of socio-political science fiction: a future society split vertically and divided into corporations. A liquid plasma is the consciousness of the world, kept in the computer of a bank. A fault develops and the liquid disperses progressively — total loss of human consciousness. That is Evaporazione, the ninety-second opening, and Il massacro di Brandeburgo. Then the notes set out the possible evolutionary hypotheses. Power to the old, as keepers of a memory of the past that excludes and rejects the problems of the present: Gerontocrazia. Power to women, as suppliers of energy and radical new contributions, in opposition to their historical repression: SCUM. It is a concept album in the strict sense, and the concept is an argument about who inherits a world that has forgotten how to think.

The sound

Free jazz and free improvisation with the progressive rock scaffolding still faintly visible, and the personnel crisis turns out to have been productive. With Lacy’s soprano darting through the middle of it and Lytton on percussion, Area sound less like an Italian band with guests than like a European improvising ensemble that happens to contain them. Fariselli prepares the piano. Tofani plays objects and phrases his guitar to sound like synthesiser squelch. Stratos does what he had been building towards for three albums: on Diforisma urbano he arrives three minutes in and is not singing at all, but delivering glottal articulations, scat fragments and breathy vowel shapes that widen the harmonic vocabulary of the piece. No verses, no choruses, no concessions. This is the point where Area stopped being a rock band with jazz in it.

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The songs

Evaporazione is under two minutes and sets the story going. Diforisma urbano runs on syncopated electric piano clusters over a double bass foundation, with Lacy weaving between the keyboards and Tofani’s attacks. Gerontocrazia is seven and a half minutes and has the original rhythm section, which you can hear immediately. SCUM is the other one they play on. Il massacro di Brandeburgo numero tre in sol maggiore does to Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto exactly what the title promises, in two minutes and twenty seconds. Giro, giro, tondo had already been previewed on stage — its drum pattern turns up inside a long instrumental on the previous year’s live album. And Caos (parte seconda) closes at nine minutes, the second part of something whose first part is not here, which is either a joke or a statement and is probably both.

Reception and legacy

The hardest Area studio record to love and the one that settles what they were. Tavolazzi and Capiozzo came back within months, but the gap left a mark on the catalogue: while they were away the band recorded Event ’76 at the Università Statale in Milan with Lacy and Lytton, released three years later. Two more concerts from the tour surfaced long afterwards, Concerto Teatro Uomo in 1996 and Live in Torino 1977 in 2005 — this material had a long life on stages that nobody documented at the time. Most CD editions add an interview with Stratos, Tofani and Fariselli recorded after the Event ’76 concert. Tofani made one more studio album with them and then left, and the band that made 1978 was a different proposition.

The verdict

For people who already know this band, and not a note of it is easy. Crac! is where you start and Arbeit macht frei is the shock; this is where the argument goes when the audience is no longer the point. Gerontocrazia first, which has the classic five and a subject you can follow. Then Diforisma urbano, for Lacy and for what Stratos does with his throat at the three-minute mark. Then Caos (parte seconda), all nine minutes. Then read the sleeve notes and play the whole thing again. A band in the middle of falling apart, with a Basque percussion instrument and an American saxophonist, made a science fiction album about losing your mind and did not blink.

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