What if the next reunion was CSI?
After the end of the reunion tour of CCCP, thanks to which Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, Massimo Zamboni, Annarella Giudici and Danilo Fatur they returned to perform in front of thousands and thousands of people, some fans, under the photos of some symbolic dates, wrote: “and now it’s the CSI’s turn?”. A joke that could, in the future, have a grain of truth. The reference, first of all, goes to the history and vicissitudes of the formation. After the end of CCCP in 1990, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the consequent disintegration of a world, what remained of the original CCCP (Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Massimo Zamboni, the “Emilian nucleus”) he met with a “Tuscan nucleus” coming out of Litfiba, composed of Gianni Maroccolo and Francesco Magnelliwho had already collaborated on the last CCCP album, “Epica Etica Etnica Pathos”, together with their sound engineer, George Canals. A female voice was then added to these, that of Geneva Di Marco.
The Limits of CCCP
Their first collaboration began with a concert at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato (held together with Üstmamò and Disciplinatha on 18 September 1992 and documented on the album “Maciste against all”) and continued with a successful series of records. The first “Ko de mondo” came out in 1994turns thirty this year. They disbanded in the early 2000s. In essence: the CSI (Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti) were a second life, after the CCCP. But between the two bands there were and are huge differences: the first ones, as we could also notice in the reunion tour, are strictly linked to an imaginary, to a physical and performance dimension that, today, cannot have the same evocative power and disruptive, also for a question of age, of what was there at the beginning. It is no coincidence that the reunion tour was certainly a great party that allowed us to savor again the sound of an epic band for Italian music, but there were moments when it seemed like we were in a suspended universe, inside a sort of play that had the power, for better or for worse, to stop time. The contemptuous contemporaneity that CCCP had at the beginning, that sense of “here and now”, have melted and have inevitably left room for nostalgia. Their songs have always been loose cannons, technically they are more basic than those of CSI, they are influenced by punk and have as their goal, from the fastest to the slowest, to shake the listener.
The Timeless Strength of CSI
The songs of CSI, on the other hand, they are “songs” in the highest sense of the term. Both musically and textually. They are structured, dense. They no longer feed on an imaginary, they create it. They are songs that often have roots within the confines of the planet (like those of the beautiful “Electrified Tabula Rasa” from 1997inspired by a trip to Mongolia and which reached the top of the Italian charts, a historic result for independent rock), talk about war, about the crumbling of the West, about values that are crushed by consumerism but resist, about search for freedom, for spirituality, for men who become machines. Furthermore, the CSIs were much more complex as a “movement” around them. a label was created, they launched artists and marked the rock scene. What CSI wrote, unlike CCCP’s discography, is not only more relevant than ever today, but it has also been excellently preserved from a technical point of view.
CSI’s production has surpassed the threshold of time and, thanks to the greatness of many songs, it could easily be re-proposed live without appearing dusty or anchored to the past. This is precisely why a CSI reunion would make even more sense today. In the past, the members have spoken about it several times, they never hid it, but never found a complete solution (there have been some reunions but never with the entire original lineup), but now that peace has broken out again between Ferretti and Zamboni, a return may no longer be a mirage. Sure, re-igniting the CSI machine immediately after CCCP might seem like a great new commercial operation. But what does the public think? CSI should not care, giving a magical concert season. “Don’t make me an idol I’ll burn, if I become a megaphone I’ll jam”sang Ferretti in “A tratto”.
.
