MANIFESTAZIONI LIVE 2011-2023

Claudio Milano, the vocal and lyrical mastermind behind such vanguardist projects as NichelOdeon and InSonar, as well as collaborations thereof, has returned with a look at his past. This sprawling double-LP collects a cornucopia of different performances by a variety of different artists - Milano's End Friends in the album's title - that he sang with over a clearly fruitful 12 year period. The cuts chosen for this LP are never before released and represent music that won't be returned to in the studio if anywhere. It's honestly a record that floored me in multiple ways, chiefly the range Milano continues to show both vocally and in the number of fellow travelers he took the stage with. NichelOdeon and Not Me (who came to dominate his excellent studio LP Incidenti) are represented here, but he focuses more on his alternative friends I Sincopatici and Strepitz among others in this bumper crop, delivering new angles to his talent and illuminating more of the oft neglected greats of modern Italian prog.

Milano's singing and lyricism naturally define this collection, rolling through a variety of languages and dialects both contemporary and medieval. For instance he pulls out old Friulian and Sicilian tongues alongside Latin, Hellenic, and some uniquely antiquated French on top of both medieval and modern standard Italian. The lyrics furthermore speak to the wide variety of literary and musical influences he and his collaborators have drawn from. I remain astounded by the heights he achieved on Incidenti but these tracks prove that his recent triumphs are rooted in a long term growth in his vocal power and stylings. One of the zeniths collected here is his singing with the AreA successor named Area Open Project that opens this record, where he proves himself a worthy successor and beyond for Demetrio Stratos. Due praise must also be given to the Bandcamp only bonus cut "Tributo a Claudio Rocchi" in honor of Stormy Six's late great bassist/singer-songwriter which crashes different vocals and spoken words together to help eulogize him. The otherwise closing cut "SenseNonSex" provides an astounding vocal tapestry not only to Milano but Eugenioprimo Saragoni and most of all the immaculate Giulia Zaniboni in my personal favorite sequence on this record.

The instrumentation here is also excellent to say the least. There's clearly some through-lines as two bands are primarily represented and both the avant-prog scene in Italy and Milano's musical preferences are clearly apparent across the entire album. Bear in mind, however, that the ultimate cohesion in this release is a fractal that carves a myriad of stylings across the sonic landscape collected here. AOP's opener is a rhythmic opus that hardly limits itself in its jagged guitar flashes to Milano's practically echoing, mountainous rhapsodizing. NichelOdeon's representatives here are defined by acoustic guitars that beautifully set their scenes. I Sincopatici's cuts are piano driven in tasty and mind expanding ways. The final result, after all the entrancing notes and solos, is a sort of musical panopticon that takes a variety of instruments and stylings and reifies them into a sort of whole within and around the mighty Milano, who sees and sings all in his many wondrous idioms.

This double-LP is one of the hardest releases for me to describe fully - I heartily recommend the wise analysis of my fellow reviewers here to round out any understanding what Claudio Milano has given us here. But this is nothing short of wondrous and groundbreaking, masterful cutting edge music collected from a once potentially lost past and reshaped into a vessel of raw artistic power that speaks to the past, present, and future of some of prog's greatest and most vanguardist artists, and therefore of prog rock and beyond in general.