DIMENSIONE ONIRICA

Some of the coolest RPI obscure gems were albums that never really happened. Lost recordings from bands like Giro Strana and Paradiso a Basso Prezzo were in various stages of completion before some unseen hand of fate stopped their formal release at the time. Thankfully, the wisest Italian archivists Mauro Moroni and Ciro Perrino have been there to save these treasures from being lost forever to time. They have cleaned up the recordings as much as possible and released them on Mellow Records for the fans of obscure RPI. "Dimensione Onirica" is yet another title to fall under this description. The caveat emptor with these recordings is that they generally have lower quality sound and that is again the case here. And as usual, my personal response is "so what?" When one is an RPI fan with a chance to hear rare and beautiful original recordings from the early '70s, you learn how to appreciate music for music rather than fidelity. Given the choice between a 1973 wild opus with muffled sound or the latest piece of perfect sounding insipid cheese-prog, there's no contest folks. And frankly I don't feel the sound is as bad as advertised. If I can hear the melodies and musicians I am able to enjoy it. If I have trouble hearing the basic melody that's another matter. I can hear everything here just fine, it's simply low fidelity.

Formed in 1973 from the remnants of a band named Tramps, Corte dei Miracoli also featured Alessio Feltri, keyboardist of another wonderful and obscure RPI band called Il Giro Strano. Feltri actually wrote all of the material on Dimensione Onirica and it's a real shame that this material was not properly recorded and released as an official project in 1973. For these were essentially demos that sound partially unfinished and sound like the band was working them out in the studio. And still they are captivating to RPI hounds. Far less polished and fancy-pants than the official CdM release of 1976, this album is for those who like things more heavy-prog spiked with psych and jazzy tidbits here and there. It's all here though, 77-minutes of vintage keyboards, busy bass parts, hard rock guitar leads, Italian vocals, and exuberant drumming all served up in the form of long 7-13 minutes jams. It has a gritty and fairly aggressive live sound. Given that most Italian albums of this period were very short, Dimensione is almost like getting a double album. As the material was never edited and arranged for a specific 35 minute release, there is some lack of focus I suppose. But the intent here is not to enjoy a focused concept album. Here you just throw in the towel and enjoy whatever comes at you, enjoy the many paths they travel. Often it can rock pretty hard with bombastic keyboard explosions of a Banco feel, but other times things can get spacey and mellow with piano or clean guitar, then it can shift to heavy guitar rock with bluesy organ runs. Anything goes! The songs are chalk full of that vintage RPI spirit, dramatic, emotional, somehow both bold and fragile. Some truly great potential here and even if we'll never know what could have been, the creative stirrings are nonetheless fascinating to me.

I love these kinds of "underground" RPI albums and thus the rating is as easy one for me. I recommend fans of jamming and less-reserved Italian rock investigate this assuming you can deal with lower quality sound. But if you are a sound purist to any degree, don't even bother. For me, I'll enjoy this album more often than the "real" CdM album.

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