Neuguitars 2024 #22: The alienating absence of humanity in the music of Antonio Tonietti.

“No Longer Human”, Dissipatio, 2024

Italians do It Better. Again. And again. This time it was the Italian guitarist Antonio Tonietti who caught my attention, with his album “No Longer Human”, published on Dissipatio Records.

No Longer Human | Antonio Tonietti | DISSIPATIO (bandcamp.com)

The subject of Tonietti's musical construction is the novel “No longer human”, the work of the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, translated into Italian with the title “Lo Squalificato”. I have never read anything of Dazai's works, but while looking for some reviews of the book on the web, I read about a novel that talks about the protagonist's feeling of being rejected by society. A book that talks about alienation therefore, a sensation that is clearly felt in the four sound paintings, the four tracks of Tonietti's album: “First notebook”, “Second notebook”, “Third notebook” and “Epilogue”.

Tonietti belongs to that small group of guitarists who love to transform the sound of their instrument, to the point of completely forgetting not only its sonic origins, but above all its musical and cultural references. Furthermore, his attention to the sense of space contributes to the creation of a musical vision that leads to an augmented ambient, a sort of Brian Eno on steroids. The saturation of sound and the space it fills seems to be one of his stylistic traits, together with the dark and post-industrial vision that it accompanies.

I think another distinctive aspect is the use of voices within the music: having removed any melodic or song-like ambitions, the declaiming voices of Claudio Milano, Giorgio Pinardi, and Silvia Pegah Scaglione increase the sense of alienation and insert a haunting element in the music, whose further sense of detachment from the real world is given by the insertions of Massimo Amato's piano, Tetsuroh Konishi's modified alto flute and the prepared battente guitar played by Tonietti himself.

Borges teaches us in “Textos recobrados (1919-1929)” how there are two types of aesthetics: the passive aesthetics of mirrors and the active aesthetics of prisms. If guided by the mirror, art, at best, transforms itself into a copy of the objectivity of the environment or the psychic history of the individual. If instead guided by the prism, art makes the world its instrument and forges its own personal vision. It seems to me that Antonio Tonietti, and with him Dissipatio Records, has taken advantage of this teaching.

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