Postcards from Italy - The Fifth

Postcards from Italy - the fourth

Postcards From Italy - the third

Postcards From Italy - the second

***This is fucking ridiculous. I sent this on the seventh or the eighth, it's now the nineteenth - I'm home. It was meant to tie in with the week before last's theme, Youth - to constitute the music entry for that week, see. There are three more of these to come - godonlyknows when they'll make it into James' grubby hands. In fact, tomorrow morning I'm going to send James the sixth and final Postcard From Italy from England - Leamington Spa, specifically - to see if it beats the others (an experiment!) which I posted variously last week. Fucking postcards. Fucking Italy. What a stupid idea. Sorry about the mixtape-delay, will be up by tonight hopefully. Sam***

Postcards From Italy - the first

Firstly, apologies for the lateness of this post. The Silkworms Ink team is currently spread thinly over the world. Sam is in Italy. I am in Glasgow. Phil is in London and Jon once again has found himself in a gaol somewhere south of Viang Chan. Fret not, your weekly chapbook will be up for your viewing pleasure later today, for now enjoy the - just about legible - first installment of Sam's Postcards from Italy, The Corridor (part one).

Youth | Mixtape | Mixtape VI, Italy

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Mixtape VI, Music As Reading Goes To Italy

Mai quest’onda mai mi affonderà, gli squali non mi avranno mai. Mai quest’onda mai mi affonderà …Sha la la la la Sha la la la la la, un’altra volta un’altra onda. Sha la la la la Sha la la la la la, quanto resisterai?

As you may have noticed on Wednesday, Music As Reading has gone to Italy!

Hence, this week’s mixtape comes to you from Italy! What follows is five Italian manifestations of something with a fair bit in common with the Music As Reading project. Part one, Opera, speaks for itself: opera is a musical reading of a historical or fictional narrative, a scattering of empty, useless words made sense of only by music, arguably the very concept of music as reading’s most sublime form. These two arias performed best of all the Italian arias in Radio 3’s slightly jingoistic Nation’s Favourite Arias. Part two contains two tracks by that rare thing, music- and culture-literate Italian bands. It is this kind of artist that has filled up a majority of the preceding mixtapes’ content, that’s why they’re here. Part three is two themes from Fellini movie soundtracks – these significant to the project because of the general question of soundtracking and the way they attempt, opera-like, to read a narrative with music. That they are evidence of a fruitful relationship between a filmmaking genius and a compositional genius is also important. Part four is a cheat, two songs written into a couple of Shakespeare’s Italian plays – ignore the fact that the Willow Song is a traditional English folk piece, not important, what is, is that Shakespeare used it, music, to define Desdemona’s final moments. Oh, and finally, two Italian fragments of that most explicit (in every sense of the word) and unavoidable form of lyricism in action, the hippity-hop. One good, one very, very bad.

Part one, Opera

E Lucevan Le Stelle (from Tosca) – Giacomo Puccini
Casta Diva (from Norma) – Vincenzo Bellini

Part two, Literate bands

A New Start for Shoegazing Kids – Giardini di Mirò
It Was Bliss! – Settlefish

Part three, Film music

Toby Dammit Theme (from Fellini’s third of Tre Passi Nel Delirio) – Nino Rota
Aria Di Roma (from Fellini’s Roma) – Nina Rota

Part four, Shakespeare in Italy

Willow Song (from Othello) – arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Light o’ Love (from Two Gentlemen of Verona) – arranged by Tom Kines

Part five, Italian hip-hop

La Grande Onda – Piotta
Tranqi Funky – Articolo 31

Youth | Music | Postcards from Italy

Music As Reading has gone Italy! I lie: in fact, at the time of writing, Music As Reading is sitting on his bedroom floor half-writing, half-packing in preparation for his Tuscan holiday – it’s Friday 2nd July, soon to become Saturday 3rd July. Music As Reading is coming at you…from the past!

Anyway, long and short of it is Italy and t’internet are, despite sharing two letters (three if you count the T twice) not as happy friends as England and t’internet (by England, I mean all of England except Cumbria). Which means that for two weeks only, Music As Reading (mixtapes not included within that umbrella-sort-of-term incidentally – I prepared those earlier) will be relying upon more analogue methods of communication. Inspiration courtesy of the wonderful Beirut, whose ‘Postcards from Italy’ can be enjoyed in its Spotified entirety if you’re willing to click on the hyperlinked title above…

Whose ‘Postcards from Italy’ also has some maybe-profound things to say about this week’s theme, yoof, actually:

The times we had
Oh, when the wind would blow with rain and snow
Were not all bad
We put our feet just where they had, had to go
Never to go…

The shattered soul
Following close but nearly twice as slow
In my good times
There were always golden rocks to throw
At those who admit defeat too late
Those were our times, those were our times…

And I will love to see that day
That day is mine
When she will marry me outside with the willow trees
And play the songs we made
They made me so
And I would love to see that day
Her day was mine…

Hmmm. A link at best tenuous, at worst entirely non-existent. I’ll move on. Basically, throughout my Tuscan retreat (lol) I’ll be sending postcards from Italy to one of my fellow editors in lieu of contributing to the blog (for, let’s be honest, this is hardly a proper contribution) in the hope that, A, they don’t get lost or take a million years to get to England, it being not quite yet high season, and B, one of said editors can be arsed to scan them into the blog so Silkworms gets to see them. Both sides please chaps, scan both sides! Not yet being in Italy, I obviously have no idea what I’m going to write, but I will promise now that it will be vaguely linked to the weekly themes and SHORT. Such is the advantage of postcards. An advantage blogging lacks, as I daresay you’ve noticed.

They shall be our very own Postcards from Italy – without a ukulele in sight or sound. Actually, I lie, Mother’s bringing her ukulele with her, so goodness knows what kind of synthesis might happen. Useful fact: BA are cool with passengers bringing a musical instrument (guitar or smaller) in addition to their hand luggage onto their flights. A boon Mother intends to take full advantage of. I recommend you do the same. And there you were thinking BA were strike-breaking bastardbitches and nothing more. Shame on you. Shame on us all.

(To access a [very, very short] Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor