Diaphragm: 40 years of “Siberia”

A cold, boundless, lunar panorama, with houses in the distance. It seems like an exile and instead, perhaps, today more than ever, after forty years, it is peace, it is freedom. That of doing exactly what you want and feel inside. “Siberia” by Diaframma, a gem of Italian rock, turns four decades. It is a record born from a specific historical periodwas the first ring of the Florentine band and is still considered today as a point of reference for the Italian new wave scene, and beyond. The music is strongly influenced by English post-punk groups, first and foremost Joy Divisionwith typically dark atmospheres and symbolist lyrics that express a strong inner discomfort and at the same time a liberating catharsis.

“Siberia” inaugurated a season of rock sung in Italian which will have a huge impact on the entire national scene. The following year, 1985, will also see the long-distance debut of Litfiba (present in the track “Amsterdam” on the Diaframma album) with “Desaparecido” which will break down this door even more. “Post-punk and new wave, like punk, had represented an opportunity to start from scratch – recalled Federico Fiumani, soul of the band – without feeling any obligation towards the past and finding, in this new space, the favorable ground to create something good without having to be ashamed of anything, not even of making music which is sometimes extremely poor in terms of from a technical point of view. But if punk basically took up and proposed, albeit distorting, elements of tradition, with post-punk and wave something new was played and different from everything that had been done up to then. And it was done with a will and arrogance that only young people can have.”

To understand this, it is important to also remember the historical period in which this album was released. “The first, the most important, concerns the fact that in the Italy of the time a record as wonderfully alien as Diaframma’s debut could be released – wrote the author Nicola Lagioia on Minima&moralia – the country didn’t deserve it, yet it happened. Those were the years, so to speak, in which the Ricchi e Poveri triumphed in Sanremo when Al Bano and Romina Power didn’t. The ebb was traveling at full speed, the aesthetics were infected by it. At a certain point it seemed that the only bull’s eye under which it was worth spending time was the one that saw brokers and advertisers afflicted by good gimmicks refrigerating platitudes at stylists’ parties, while their younger brothers with Timberlands on their feet ran the gamut returning illiteracy which would have become an avalanche. The involuntary lunatic was passed off as gold, and the magnificent presences that could have broken the chains of the countryman in glamorous sauce (those books, records and films that made beauty their raison d’être) were temporarily taken out of the scene to make room for the sequins, the grunts, that immense bandwagon of stupidity that was the Eighties in Italy”. Federico Fiumani is one of the best musical pens we have ever had in our country. And “Siberia” demonstrated it right from the start.

Listening to the album today, as we already wrote years ago on the occasion of the reloaded release, has a strange effect: because Fiumani’s poetics retains all its strength, but the sound is inextricably linked to that era, to that new wave made of melodic bass, echoing guitars and deep voices. A sound that was very powerful then, compared to the music of the time, “an album that could compete with the best post-punk records across the border”, as Lagioia has always rightly reiterated. The tracklist has no weak points: thanks to all the songs you enter an often claustrophobic world that lives on short circuits such as those between darkness and light, cold and heat, night and day, love and loneliness , noise and silence. Federico Guglielmi, an important figure in Italian journalism, wrote in il Mucchio Selvaggio n.82 of November 1984, reviewing the album and immediately understanding its importance in the evolution of Italian rock, he wrote a prophetic sentence: “’Siberia’ is the first small but big step towards going outdoors, hoping – or rather, being convinced – not to encounter ‘only ice and silence’”.