Fabio Zuffanti is the name attached to this band everywhere, and Zuffanti himself has gone on record to say that is wrong. Finisterre, he says, is the example of his non-centrality in groups that outsiders read as his projects: the principal composer has always been the pianist Boris Valle, and it is thanks to Valle that Finisterre never became just another neo-prog band. Valle brought contemporary music, electronics and minimalism. Zuffanti brought his love of classic progressive rock. Marelli brought Pink Floyd, pop and the Italian songwriting tradition. That is the recipe, from the man everyone credits.

The short version

In Limine is the second Finisterre album, released in 1996 on Mellow Records and recorded at New Musical Box. Zuffanti plays bass and sings; Boris Valle plays keyboards; Stefano Marelli plays Stratocaster, nylon and acoustic and twelve-string guitars, plus harp-guitar, and sings; Francesca Biagini plays flutes and directed the choir; Marcello Mazzocchi plays drums and acoustic and electronic percussion. The band formed in Genoa in April 1993 out of a previous group called Calce & Compasso. The closing suite, Orizzonte degli eventi, is Zuffanti’s. Executive production is credited to Mauro Moroni and Ciro Perrino.

Mellow

That last name is worth stopping on. Ciro Perrino was the drummer, singer and Mellotron player of Celeste, whose only album sat unreleased for two years before a tiny label put it out in 1976 and sold four thousand copies. He founded Mellow Records in the late eighties, and Mellow spent years rescuing records the Italian industry had abandoned — Biglietto per l’Inferno’s shelved second album, Alphataurus, Corte dei Miracoli’s unreleased debut. By 1996 the label had started doing something else: signing new bands. Finisterre were twenty-somethings from Genoa when Mellow picked them up in 1994, and the man producing them had been in exactly their position twenty years earlier, and nobody had come.

The sound

It would have been easy to repeat the debut, which had been received rapturously. They changed instead, and kept changing on every record afterwards. Zuffanti’s own summary is the accurate one: where the first album was straightforwardly progressive, this one has free, industrial, minimalist, folk and jazz moments — a very abstract jazz. Underneath, the textures are acoustic guitar, flute and piano in quantity, with a compositional complexity most of their contemporaries never attempted, and, as one specialist noted with relief, not a single digital chiff anywhere. Valle plays a little sampled Mellotron: faint strings on XXV, and a very upfront part at the climax of the closer.

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The songs

The title track goes back to the symphonic writing of the debut, though even it has a vaguely jazz interlude sitting in the middle of it, which tells you where this band’s heads were. The album is worth having for its final twenty minutes and more: Algos and Orizzonte degli eventi together run about half an hour of classically-inflected progressive rock, with a well-arranged string section and other orchestral instruments behind them, and they add up to one of the high points of the entire nineties scene. Orizzonte degli eventi is Zuffanti’s composition and has been called the sonic manifesto of Italian progressive rock in that decade. There is a choir. Marelli plays a harp-guitar. Nobody was doing this in 1996.

Reception and legacy

A high point of the decade, and the record that established Finisterre as something other than revivalists. The band played ProgDay in Chapel Hill in 1997 — an afternoon set, in front of a crowd one observer described as strangely muted — and the American circuit adopted them, as it had adopted Deus Ex Machina. What listeners hear in it varies enormously and the disagreement is instructive: some hear King Crimson, ELP and Yes and call it a must-have; others hear jazz fusion; at least one is baffled that anybody hears fusion at all and insists it is seventies progressive rock straight down the line. Mazzocchi left at the end of the year. Biagini left early in 1997.

The verdict

Essential, and the strongest argument that this scene had a real second act. Orizzonte degli eventi first, the whole suite, undivided — if the nineties produced a better twenty minutes of Italian progressive rock, nobody has named it. Then Algos immediately before it, in order, because they were built as a pair. Then the title track. Then start at the beginning. Zuffanti went on to Hostsonaten, La Maschera di Cera and a dozen other things, and he will still tell you this was Boris Valle’s band.

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