The title is the phrase that stood above the gates of the camps. The Italian subtitle on the sleeve translates it: il lavoro rende liberi, work makes you free. Six musicians in Milan in 1973 chose those words for their first album because they were looking for something that would shake and challenge consciences, and the cover is a black field with a wooden monster and a padlock, and the earliest copies came with a cardboard gun. The record is a shock on first hearing and it was meant to be. It was also the first release on Cramps, and it changed Italian music.

The short version

Arbeit macht frei is the debut album by Area — International POPular Group, released on 15 September 1973 on Cramps and produced by the band. Thirty-six minutes, recorded between a farmhouse in Abbiategrasso and a club in Rimini. The line-up is a sextet: Demetrio Stratos on vocals, organ and steel drums; Paolo Tofani on lead guitar and VCS3 synthesiser; Patrizio Fariselli on piano and electric piano; Patrick Djivas on bass and double bass; Eddie Busnello on reeds; Giulio Capiozzo on drums. Fariselli composed and arranged all the music. Gianni Sassi wrote the words as Frankenstein, with Sergio Albergoni. Djivas and Busnello both left after it came out; Djivas joined PFM.

International POPular Group

They met by accident. In the summer of 1972 Alberto Radius of Formula 3 was making a solo album built as an extended jam session, and on an instrumental called Area a particular set of players clicked: Stratos, Capiozzo, keyboardist Gaetano Leandro, Djivas and guitarist Johnny Lambizzi. The track worked, so they kept going and took its name, adding Busnello on saxophone. Leandro and Lambizzi left, Fariselli came in, and Tofani arrived from an intense spell in England via Franco Mamone and Gianni Sassi. A deal with Battisti and Mogol’s Numero Uno fell through; a first album, Fading Faces in a Walking Dream, was recorded at the end of 1972 and vanished without trace. Then Sassi signed them to his new label and put them straight into a studio. Stratos, incidentally, was a Greek beat singer who had come from I Ribelli of Pugni chiusi.

The sound

Jazz fusion is the label and it does not begin to cover it: Mediterranean and Middle Eastern inflections fused with the European avant-garde, driven by a singer whose cultural formation made that fusion natural rather than decorative. Everyone talks about Stratos’s voice, correctly, and forgets he also plays the organ. Tofani’s VCS3 is the other signature, and Djivas holds it all down with ostinatos that never let the strangeness float away. Sassi’s words — he ran in Fluxus circles and it shows — are hermetic and paradoxically direct at the same time. The band were openly communist and never pretended otherwise, and the politics are not a coating on the music: they are the reason for its shape. Strident, provocative, and genuinely difficult on first contact, which was the point.

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The songs

Luglio, agosto, settembre (nero) opens with a woman reciting a poem for peace in Arabic — Rafia Rashed, taped in a museum in Cairo, and legend insists the recording was smuggled out. Lay down your weapons, my love, and come and live with me in peace. Then Stratos and the VCS3 come in with one of the most famous riffs in Italian music, Djivas sets an ostinato under it, and the piece becomes a downpour of Middle Eastern sound. Its central section is what Chiriacò calls the suq: you can hear yourself walking through a loud, brilliantly coloured market. It is a manifesto and an instruction to think with your own head. L’abbattimento dello Zeppelin was the single, and Stratos sings it in the voice of the fire — everyone says it was my fault — with the airship standing in for the whole machinery of spectacle.

Reception and legacy

One of the most critically acclaimed albums ever made in Italy, and fifty years on it still leaves people speechless. It has been called the first LP of radical music; it is a fixture in every list of Italian milestones; it launched Cramps and it made Stratos a figure nobody could ignore. The cardboard gun tells you about the moment: the insert was stamped with the words for evidence of a crime, and there is still an argument about it — some critics insist it is a P38, the pistol that had become a revolutionary emblem in those years, and others insist just as firmly that it is nothing of the kind. Sassi’s art direction, Edoardo Sivelli’s sculpture, Fabio Simion’s photograph. Nobody has ever accused this band of being harmless. They never wanted to be.

The verdict

Essential, and the place to begin with Area. Luglio, agosto, settembre (nero) first — it is the whole band and the whole argument in one piece, and if it does not work on you, nothing else here will. Then L’abbattimento dello Zeppelin. Then play the record whole, twice, because the first time is a shock and the second time is when you hear it. Crac! from 1975 is the other one everybody names, and 1978 is where the story ends. This is a sextet in a farmhouse and a club, with a phrase from the worst place in Europe on the sleeve, refusing to let anyone listen comfortably.

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