The singer does not sing. For fifty-three minutes Paolo Carelli talks — declaims, intones, refuses every melody the band puts under him — while five musicians build one of the most extreme pieces of music Italy produced in the whole decade. It starts on a tram. It ends with the world. Vittorio De Scalzi of the New Trolls produced it and put it out on the label he had just started, which means the man who gave Italy its most beloved progressive record also bankrolled its least commercial one. It sold nothing. It is unforgettable.

The short version

Their only album, recorded at Studio G in Genoa and released in 1973 on Magma in a fold-out sleeve with an inner bag, fifty-three minutes long. There are two tracks on it and that is purely because a vinyl side runs out; the piece is continuous and there are no breaks anywhere in it. Paolo Carelli does the voice; Elleino Colladet plays guitar; Valentino Galbusera and Maurizio Pancotti both play keyboards; Rinaldo Linati plays bass; Giampiero Nava plays drums. Six men, one piece, one apocalypse. The band was named after a shellfish.

De Scalzi’s label

Magma was Vittorio De Scalzi’s, newly founded, and this is the record he chose to make with it — which tells you something about what the New Trolls’ founder actually liked, as opposed to what he was famous for. Pholas Dactylus had earned it: they were a serious live band with a real following, and among the shows they played was a support slot for Amon Duul II, which is exactly the right company for them. Those gigs were not always comfortable. There are first-hand accounts of Milanese audiences whistling and shouting while Carelli carried on declaiming his visions over the top, entirely unmoved. Then the album came out, sold nothing at all, and the band dissolved before the end of 1973. Everything about that sequence feels correct.

The sound

Avant-garde and progressive rock welded together in a way even the famous Italian bands rarely attempted. The music moves from broad, genuinely gorgeous melodic writing into clusters of odd time, then into noise, then into free playing with the ghost of King Crimson in it, and back again, across fifty-three minutes with no verse and no chorus to hold on to. Two keyboard players give it enormous weight. And over all of it there is the voice: not sung, spoken, endlessly, hypnotic if it takes you and unbearable if it does not. The recording is poor — that is the other standard complaint and it is true. Both criticisms are fair and neither is the point. This belongs with Il Balletto di Bronzo’s Ys at the extreme edge of what Italian progressive rock was willing to do, and records like that are not graded on politeness.

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The fifty-three minutes

The story is a visionary one and it does not explain itself. A man gets on a tram, an ordinary journey in an ordinary city, and somewhere along the route the thing tips: the delirium starts, the dimensions come apart, and what follows is an end of the world assembled out of Biblical and mythological imagery, narrated from inside. Side one runs about twenty-nine minutes, side two about twenty-four, and the split means nothing — play it whole or do not play it. The most quoted opinion about this album, repeated by prog listeners for fifty years, is that if the narrator had said less it would have been a monster. Possibly. It would also have been a different record, and a smaller one.

Reception and legacy

Commercially it did not exist. As an object it became one of the hardest Italian records to find: the original Magma pressing with the yellow label, complete with inner sleeve, and a promotional single with two extracts that is rarer still. There are no counterfeits and there were never any foreign pressings, which in this corner of collecting is its own kind of certificate. The reissues came much later — Japan on CD, then Black Widow, then a blue-vinyl edition with a reproduction of the period poster. And then, in 2019, the surprise: three of the original six reconvened and made a second Pholas Dactylus album, in a style not far from this one, forty-six years later. Some provocations take their time.

The verdict

For the curious, and be honest with yourself about whether that is you. This is not a record you put on; it is a record you submit to, once, in one sitting, with nothing else happening. If the spoken voice locks in during the first ten minutes you will hear one of the most singular things in Italian music. If it does not, nothing later will rescue it and you should stop. Then Il Balletto di Bronzo’s Ys for the same territory with singing, and Amon Duul II for the band who let these six on stage in front of them. A tram, a voice, and the end of everything, funded by the man who wrote the Concerto Grosso.

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