Ten years of “Costellazioni”: a provincial and spatial album

“Costellazioni”, the third album by Le Luci della Centrale Elettrica, turns ten. And listening to it again today you no longer just have the sensation, as happened at the time, but the certainty that you are in front of the best album of the musical project with which Vasco Brondi produced music in that period and which he abandoned in 2019, evolving. “Songs from the defaced beach” and “For now we will call happiness”, the first two Le Luci albums, it is as if they were part of a single large blockdirect, spare and punk, while “Terra” from 2017, despite still being under the banner “Luci della Centrale Elettrica”, is already more of a Vasco Brondi albumwith more particular and open arrangements and musical inventions.

“Constellations” remains in the middle of these two coordinates and is the highest chapter of that musical juncture because it managed to absorb all the imagery built by Brondi up to that moment and elevate it, taking it to the Moon, in a new dimension of story and sound. It was and is a record of very distant points coming together, and also for this reason today it stands the test of time very well. On December 2nd he will perform it in its entirety at Alcatraz in Milan. Songs like “The girls are fine”, “I destini generali”, “La Terra, l’Emilia, la Luna” are among the jewels of Brondi’s entire discographyand in fact they also often appear in the playlists of recent years. The album is “geographical”: talks about space and intergalactic travel, about difficult and unlikely futures, but at the same time about stories just a few steps away. Drop in the music tales of cities, provinces and humanity in general who understood that the only way to not be afraid of the dark is to enter it and illuminate it. Just as the CCCP said: “not in Berlin, but in Carpi”, Brondi encouraged us to reflect on the fact that you don’t have to be in New York or who knows where to see beauty or to be in the heart of the Earthbecause we can all be at the center of our little big universe. And so the characters in the songs depart, arrive, undertake interstellar or sun journeys 40 kilometers. They find things amazing that aren’t actually amazing and try to realize themselves despite the difficulties. I arrive at the

second position in the Fimi ranking of the best-selling albums in Italy.

“It’s an album about the future, to play down tomorrow, to dance under the bombs: I had the need to tell stories that shed light, that faced the world starting from an acceptance of what people have around them. This is how we rediscover the value of small things, of the small happinesses of the province, but which in reality are spatial joys, they are everywhere and for everyone”, the artist said at the time. Who through a recent post recalled: “Ten years of a record that brought a big change for me. After the first two albums where I had found a voice and four years of silence, I had returned from a six-month long solitary journey and I started writing again. The result was ‘Costellazioni’, a provincial and spatial album. We play it at Alcatraz, the city where I wrote it in a small apartment in Lambrate before re-moving to Bologna and re-re-moving to Ferrara. It was the beginning of the end of my youth. It was a big party, a quiet fight. Without ironic detachment, without disenchantment. Only immense confusion and immense freedom”.

Also Federico Dragogna, who was the album’s producer, dedicated a post to the project: “I have this memory of me and Vasco on the balcony of his kitchen in Ferrara, after a punitive and monastic dinner as we love to do, while we try to fit the torrential lyrics of ’40 Km’ into four chords. It’s surreally hot, we’re thirty years old and we’re there singing very long and poignant verses in two voices in front of an audience of closed shutters. Today’s discography would have called those days in Ferrara spent inventing ‘Costellazioni’ ‘a session’ – thus including us in a broader and more efficient system of cultural production, one that lends us English words for Italian things we have some problems with or what they hide some shame, such as spending their days decorating songs. I think we have to overcome that shame, but keep a little of it inside – and the fact that I slept on a sponge mattress among the microphones perhaps had something to do with this. We always worked, except for a few hours of sleep and meal breaks, also because it didn’t feel like workit seemed rather like building a spaceship with a friend, with rigor and improvisation, drastic changes and very slow filing work”.