The title translates as Material for Three Performers and Magnetic Tape, which is not an album title but a description of contents, and that is the joke and the warning at once. A year earlier Dedalus had made one of the best jazz-rock records Italy produced. Then the bassist left, and the three who remained abandoned every codified genre they had been working in and went into electronic music, musique concrete, improvisation and noise. It is one of the most transgressive Italian albums of the decade, and one of the least welcome.

The short version

Materiale per tre esecutori e nastro magnetico is the second Dedalus album, recorded over the winter at the Format studio in Turin and released in 1974 on Trident, just before that label ceased trading. Around forty-four minutes. The band are a trio here: Marco Di Castri, Fiorenzo Bonansone and Enrico Grosso. Furio Di Castri had left to begin what became a long career as a jazz bassist. Bonansone brought in material from contemporary classical, concrete and electronic music and wrote most of the pieces. The sleeve is fifteen plates of food, some eaten and some waiting.

The turn

Before the recording the group played a run of concerts with the Circoli Ottobre during the 1974 referendum campaign, with saxophonist Enzo Carabetta joining them temporarily; he is not on the record. Italian writers link that period directly to what happened next, describing the album as evidence that the band had absorbed the most radical ideas then circulating in the counterculture, and had taken an artistic and political position that pushed them to the limit of what they could communicate. Whether or not you accept the causation, the timing is not in dispute and neither is the result. This was a considered decision, not a drift. They knew exactly what they were giving up.

The sound

Every reference to a codified genre is gone. What replaces it is a radical experimental approach: electronics, tape, musique concrete, free improvisation and noise, with a dissonant saxophone moving through it and no structure to hold on to. This is avant-garde, not progressive rock and not jazz-rock, and the honest description is that it belongs to a different shelf entirely. What its defenders point out is worth weighing: it does not aim at cacophony, there is real class in the noise-making, and it is not the usual hasty freak collage. You have to follow every small sound. There is a harmony of sorts traced through these electronic jokes, and they are never boring and never merely intellectual.

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The songs

Rumore bianco opens with thirty-three seconds of tape and tells you most of what you need to know. Discorso su due piani is two and a half minutes for treated guitar and cello, moving between jazz and classical writing, and it is the most immediately graspable thing here. Spazio di sei note is an absurd, surreal assembly of fragments lasting seconds each. Improvvisazione per cello, sax tenore e percussioni does exactly what its title says and does it well. Esserci is the long one at over seven minutes. La Bergera runs under two. Titles as literal as these are a statement in themselves: nothing is being dressed up, and nothing is being sold to you.

Reception and legacy

Opinion on this album is not divided so much as at war. On one side: forty minutes of pure avant-garde from a band with the nerve to walk away from what they were good at. On the other, and stated plainly by more than one listener, bafflement — what possessed them to turn to second-rate avant-garde remains a mystery to people who love the debut, and to some ears this sounds like an entirely different band with no grounding and no clear ideas. Both reactions are honest. It sold a few thousand copies despite the label collapsing and despite being genuinely hard to listen to. It now turns up in guides to Italian underground and experimental music rather than progressive ones, which is probably where it belongs.

The verdict

For the very open-minded, and after the debut, never before it. Discorso su due piani first, because it is the bridge between the two albums and the only track that will make sense on a first pass. Then Improvvisazione per cello, sax tenore e percussioni. Then Esserci, with time and patience. If you want the Dedalus everyone recommends, that record is the 1973 one. This is what happened when four became three and the three decided that being liked was not the point.

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