Patrizio Fariselli talks about Arbeit Macht Frei

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In a year as full of splendid fifty-somethings as 2023, Arbeit Macht Frei stands out as one of the most important records in all of Italian rock. The debut album Area, an album that has aged without suffering the wounds of time, is responsible for a fusion of rock, jazz, contemporary, Eastern European and Mediterranean music. For convenience we could say they were a prog band, but they never liked the term much. The Area of Arbeit Macht Frei were beyond that, they deployed an inventiveness and instrumental technique that was unrivalled and could count on the presence of Demetrio Stratos who made it clear what it meant to expand the voice beyond all limits in songs in which they attempted to set revolution to music, to the point of killing rock and its masters. We were told about this by Patrizio Fariselli.

Ah, well... The best and the worst has come out over time... it's a record that is now consigned to history and... I don't know (laughs).

At the end of the 60s I met Giulio Capiozzo, we played with him all the time, one jam session after another. We were two crazy crazy people in Romagna at the time, obsessed above all with jazz, we were breaking everyone's balls to play that music, even in dance clubs. Every now and then, perhaps taking advantage of the late hours, we even managed to slip in a little jazz tune disguised as a ballad. The rest of the time we spent dreaming about forming a stratospheric band that would break everything, that would make crazy music, without any kind of concession to the market.

Of course, first there was the hurdle of the naja to overcome. I left when I was 19 and in the meantime Giulio, who was five years older than me, joined Demetrio Stratos' group, with whom he played in dance halls. But when they would meet in the cellar to rehearse, that desire to throw down highly creative material would come out again. During the licences I would join them and witness the things this crazy group came up with. At that time there was Capiozzo, Patrick Djivas on bass, Eddy Busnello on sax, Johnny Lambizzi on guitar and Leandro Gaetano on piano.

I took over from Leandro immediately. The last to come in then was Paolo Tofani who replaced Lambizzi. With this line-up, we started to arrange the material that would later be included in Arbeit Macht Frei, we worked on it a lot, we put in improvised parts together with defined patterns, we lengthened, shortened, and shaped everything until the pieces became concrete.

We met him through Franco Mamone, who was the manager of PFM and Banco at the time. He also took Area without really understanding what he had in his hands, thinking of making a profit, even a financial one. We, however, had other ideas, which became even more extreme when we met Sassi.

Mamone and Sassi at that time were talking about founding a label, or rather a multi-purpose structure that would take care of the management of artists in its entirety, in fact the name Cramps stands for Clubs, Records, Agency, Management, Publishing, Shows. After a while, some disagreements emerged between the two and the project passed into Sassi's hands. However, there were also problems of our own with Mamone: the proposed material was not easy to listen to and our political stances were becoming increasingly radical, and if there is one thing that is bad for business, it is this. Gianni Sassi liked this very much and therefore decided to collaborate with us, taking care of our image, photos, promotion and publication.

Never, he created the Area 'concept' and wrote the lyrics in collaboration with his partner Sergio Albergoni, signing himself Frankenstein. But he never had anything to say about the music, that was our business.

Area had a very strong instrumental vocation, but we had a voice, and what a voice! Since we didn't make songs though, the lyrics were marginal for us, for the points where there were vocal parts Demetrio had prepared lyrics in English, a language he knew very well having attended an English school in Alexandria. They were very imaginative poetic compositions, which he sang to the complete indifference of the rest of us, busy as we were to get the best out of the instruments. Sassi, on the other hand, immediately insisted that we also communicate through our own language. So we started having meeting after meeting in which he would tell us about the concept of the whole project, which for us who only thought about music was strange, to say the least. It wasn't easy to convince Demetrio to sing in Italian, he was already pissed off having done Pugni chiusi and all that stuff with the Rebels, by then he was oriented elsewhere.

We were pulled into this cauldron, but at the time we didn't have a damn thing to do with it, we didn't care, not out of snobbery but because we only marginally shared those parameters. It is also important to note that almost all the bands of the time looked westwards, while we turned our heads elsewhere, towards the east, towards the Mediterranean, towards the roots of Demetrio, who at that juncture rediscovered his own origins, the music that was in his blood. The prog groups worked on odd times, but we went straight to the source, to the Balkan world, we delved into Cretan music, we were world music before this term existed.

Among the peculiarities of the group was improvisation, the pivotal instrument with which we developed the pieces. Then some were really jazz musicians, like Capiozzo or, later, Tavolazzi. I was a bit in the middle, a great love and knowledge of jazz, but also sharing with Stratos and Tofani a more rock soul, as well as a look towards contemporary music. In this cauldron of different visions, another was born.

Yes, but we played on it, we were taking the piss (laughs).

Of course, we took it badly! It was a moment when we were on the launching pad and it put us in trouble. Then I understand his choices and I think he made the right ones, it was the wrong time and the wrong way. And anyway, thanks to this exit we brought in Ares Tavolazzi, sorry if that's not enough.

Actually that Fariselli is my father: Terzo Fariselli. None of us was registered with Siae and so we deposited the tracks in his name.

When I was very young, I occasionally helped out in the family business, with dad and my uncle, who had one of the most renowned ballroom dance orchestras in Romagna.

In my grandfather's time there were some crazy people who could have competed with jazz musicians, you needed a madonna technique to play the clarinet in C, which was very difficult. One says liscio and thinks of Casadei, in reality there is a very old tradition of incredible musicians.

See, that's a question no one has ever asked me (laughs). Indeed, making so many harmonic instruments coexist was no picnic, but I can tell you that we never had the slightest problem or conflict. You had to be careful what your colleague suggested and coordinate accordingly. I remind you then that at the time extraordinary records like Bitches Brew were released, in which there were people like Corea and Zawinul, and not one note conflicted with another. We were following that example.

An ARP Odyssey, the one I got in London. I thought: 'f**k, everybody has the Moog, I want something different'. And anyway it had potentialities closer to my nature. To tell you one, there was the pitch transposer, in the form of a wheel, which could usually give a tone up or down. The one on the ARP gave a ninth above and a ninth below, a range of more than two octaves in the hand. In solos I would literally make him shout, amplifying it with a Fender for guitar.

We all shared a path of limits of exploration of our instrument, his was the voice and so you can understand why he tried to go that far. Demetrio was a very curious person, attracted to things out of the ordinary. He often said: 'I want to know everything that has been done in the world on my instrument'. His work started from there, in parallel with mine and Paolo's. I lived in close contact with him and witnessed his growth, the work on himself that flowed into Area's music. Then there was a moment when that was no longer enough for him, the group was too tight for him, and so he went his own way. At that moment his career was about to take off to planetary levels, he had gone to New York welcomed by John Cage as a great revelation, and Cage's word at the time meant the opening of many doors. He was going to have a crazy career.

When we composed it Demetrio sang it in English and the title remained, even if it was translated, it was in fact called The Lips of Time. It is close to the song form, when we were still playing together for a short time and the direction was not yet so defined and the instrumental dimension had not yet fully taken over.

What's 240 kilometres from Izmir? I'll let you in on a secret: I don't know, nobody knows (laughs). Another jam piece bequeathed to us by Johnny Lambizzi. It was the first thing I had to measure myself against when I joined the group and it was not at all easy to get to grips with that infernal series of notes and breaks (he sings the opening theme, nda), you had to be super precise and it was a sort of entrance exam. The rhythmic game here becomes arduous: a 15/16 in the first part on which Eddy develops his solo and Capiozzo and I lead this extreme odd game. When the sax reaches its climax the piece shifts into 4/4 with a Djivas solo, then Tofani and I start up again, passing the ball around until the climax, when the final theme emerges. This is very much influenced by certain prog modules.

Are you kidding? I loved Emerson, he had it all in him. When I was in the military Tarkus came out, man, an incredible record, I can still hear it now. There's a crazy amount of ideas in it, it's a work of extreme maturity.

Let's say that Wakeman and I never understood each other (laughs). I loved Soft Machine, Nucleus, even King Crimson.

Well, not so much. We toured with them and I thought they were great, but they were pretty far away from us, for one thing they never improvised, which was fundamental for us. In the end, I'll tell you, Area were very self-referential, we had so many things of our own to say that we didn't really look so much to the outside.

It's a very strange song, at the beginning it was based on a guitar arpeggio and a series of hits, of explosions almost like a Greek tragedy. Live we then developed it into various solos. On the record we turned it into a kind of performance, with a collective improvisation topped with Demetrio's first recitar-singing. All to symbolise the breaking down of the inflated balloons of capitalist rock. The explosion that can be heard is that of the missile that takes out the huge blimp, with reference to Led Zeppelin who we chose as the scapegoat and paid for all. There are two takes of this piece, and if you listen to the discarded one you will realise that it is a completely different track. It is giving me great satisfaction in the take that we are proposing with the current line-up.

Taking advantage of the recent Cramps celebrations, I have put together a line-up (with Marco Micheli on bass, Walter Paoli on drums, Claudia Tellini on vocals and my brother Stefano on woodwinds, ed.) to perform the entire Arbeit Macht Frei live, i.e. tracks that hadn't been performed since the record was released. It could be a way of bringing sounds and ways of understanding music that have been somewhat lost today to the ears of those who were not there. Without creating the cover band effect, but rather keeping alive the spirit that moved us back then, including the ability to reinvent songs, night after night. It is also a way of saying to kids today: 'Look at the stuff your grandfather played'.