“Confinement” review by Fotografierock.it

An intense and thorough review of Daniele Santagiuliana “Confinement”  by Fotografierock.it

We had left Daniele Santagiuliana in the science fiction horizons of The Night Land, an album released for Hellbones Records on June 30, 2020 under the name of Testing Vault.

Yet, despite pandemic, post-lockdown and lockdown again, the multi-instrumentalist from Vicenza (an all-around artist with more than 80 albums to his credit, including collaborations and project sides) has continued to manipulate and experiment music, sending his new Confinement record creature, released on October 31st for the British label We Don’t Give A Fuck.

What better title to represent and depict the thematic core of the release and the historical period of social isolation, and not only that, which we have been experiencing for almost a year now. Confinement, as confinement, confinement and imprisonment of the mind, emotions, our nature and our individual and collective identity freedoms.

One wonders if that of Daniele Santagiuliana (who for the occasion sets aside every type of monicker) is the attempt of those who want to put their demons on a leash, of those who want to free them once and for all, or of those who, instead, feel the human urgency to disconnect from the contemporary world.

Likely, the above transcendental issues could all be valid. On the other hand, what Daniele proposes is not a genre of humoral art that goes well with moments of cheerfulness and lightheartedness. Far from it. It can be considered more as an outpouring, denial and social protest of the human being against pre-established conformism and the incommunicability of the present.

We are therefore talking about a gloomy artistic form with sinuous features, with fluid and cinematic contours, characterized by instinctive, lacerating and visionary Kafkaesque brushstrokes devoted to the obscurity of the sickness of living and the literary loneliness of cursed poets, and above all of the sounds of not easy to enjoy: in short, forget the Moltheni-style “pop” melodic lines, to understand.

The eight tracks of Confinement project us into a psychotic, disturbed, dystopian and cathartic dimension, highlighting an aesthetic deconstruction made of experimental electronics, breathtaking glitches, ambient shades and dronic frequencies, between background hums, baritone flows of consciousness and dark illuminations. and fleeting that seem to come from the memories of an indefinite time.

Santagiuliana’s sonic, visual, theatrical, psalmodial and solemn expressionism expands through the reflected and never entirely clear light of a melancholic, anguished, anxious and nihilistic photographic perspective, dragging and ferrying the listener into the Strindbergian metropolitan underworld, in contrast between the natural and mediocre surface of things and the supernatural abysses of everyday life, the latter depicted as an enormous and decadent carnival of floating souls and dying horses.

Entering the musical world of Daniele Santagiuliana means finding oneself in the presence of a stylistic mantra devoted to sound research, to spiritual suffering, to existential torment, to that liturgical tension that comes from internal malaise and that sinks the nails into the translucent contemplation of the most hidden layers of our Self.