E08 - WRONG NINNA NANNA (Bifo, Lydia Lunch, Bobby Gillespie, Marco Bertoni)
Wrong Ninna Nanna is an avant-guard opera composed by experimental music producer and composer Marco Bertoni and Franco Bifo Berardi, co-founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important figure in the Italian Autonomia Movement. We present here two tracks from the project: "The End of Cool" featuring the voice of Lydia Lunch and "The End of Prophecy" with the voice of Bobby Gillespie.
Words: Franco Bifo Berardi
Music: Marco Bertoni
Voices: Lydia Lunch, Bobby Gillespie
Produced by Marco Bertoni
https://wrongninnananna.bandcamp.com
http://www.42records.it/categoria-prodotto/wrong-ninna-nanna/
THE SOUNDTRACK OF THE APOCALYPSE (Bifo)
At the end of the Summer of 2019 I received a phone call from Marco Bertoni, a musician whom I met in the first years of the ‘80s, when he was a component of the Confusional Quartet. The musical scene of Bologna was quite alive in those years: the punk-no-wave wind was blowing, and melting with the last rushes of the insurrectional storm of 1977. The spectacular Skiantos, the radical-punk Gaz Nevada, the futuristic Stupid Set, and others whose names I don’t remember made Bologna the heart of musical innovation. The Confusional were the most cultivated, refined, more contemporary music than pop, more cold jazz than hot punk-rock.
Forty years after, in August 2019, Marco told me that he wanted to create an opera of which he had only the title in his mind. And he wanted to do that opera together with me, I don’t know why. The title struck me as an electric impulse, because it synthesised many of the lines that traverse our time: great migration, great rejection, abstract techno-financial violence, and the concrete violence of returning Nazism. When he told me the title we immediately got tuned.
Wrong Ninna Nanna.
I imagine a young hondurena mother at the border between Tijuana and San Diego, but at the border there are armed guards and now she does not know where to go and what to do, and sitting on the sand she cuddles her child. But she might also be a young Nigerian woman, or Tunisian, in a rubber boat that is trying to reach the Sicilian coast.
Marco and I have tried to imagine what a young mother who has engendered a sensitive and vulnerable being feels, when she understands what kind of world is the world in which the child is expected to grow.
Is there any reason why we should procreate?
In the movie Kafarnaum the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki tells the story of a Syrian boy twenty years old, who is dwelling in a refugee camp of Beirut, and at a certain point reports his own parents to the judiciary because they have put him in the world. Labaki’s movie has been the main inspiration for the texts that I wrote under the title Wrong Ninna Nanna: poems that are crumpled in the anguish of an age that has no more hope.
We started working on the opera during the Fall of the convulsion, the gigantic revolts that exploded from Hong Kong to Santiago, from Beirut to Barcelona to Quito to Paris in the last months of 2019.
Marco used all the musical instruments that Mother Nature has put at his disposal: wind, crows, sparrows, flowing water, and also his furiously shrill pianoforte, and choirs of enigmatic angelical voices.
Then we asked a friend whom I met in New York when I was a music writer, and who Marco has known during his musical career, a woman who is one of the greatest musical performers of our time: Lydia Lunch. She said yes, and recorded some of the pieces in her own studio then she sent us the recordings so the editing process could begin.
Then I wrote to Bobby Gillespie, the magnificent voice of Primal Scream. Do you want to take part reciting or singing or doing whatever you want? He said yes.
Then came the coronavirus, the pandemics and the lockdown, so the Curse was perfectly accomplished, and we wrote an introductory piece entitled Earth and World, for abstract voice, for a non human voice.
A producer has now proposed a vinyl edition. Yes, but when? Sooner or later. So in the meanwhile, we want to launch online this opera which is the soundtrack of the apocalypse.
We spoke with our friends Cuoghi Corsello, artists that I have known since the ‘80s when their tags adorned the walls of the banlieux of Bologna, and we asked them to collaborate on the creation of the video track of Wrong Ninna Nanna. We met just the day before the beginning of the lockdown, and in the creative solitude of the last three months CC created the videos for many pieces of WNN. The others were created by Marco Bertoni with the help of his son, F J Bertoni.
Stay tuned.
Bifo
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