sme1867/cd
Le Forbici di Manitù
Vecchie vacche

If the history of The Beach Boys includes the legendary 'lost' (...and rebuilt...) album "Smile" and The Who's "Lifehouse" album remained unfinished, even Le Forbici di Manitù can boast their "lost album", an ideal follow-up to their first full-lenght work entitled "Saliva calda" (Hot Saliva), published on cassette in 1990 by Rosa Luxemburg Corporation and reprinted again on tape in 2016 by The Tapeworm in London. The "Vecchie vacche" (Old Cows) project was in fact started around 2000 by the two original members of the group, the equally mysterious and elusive Manitù Rossi and Satana Cianciulli, who at last patched things up after a whole decade of furious quarrels and disagreements. After almost twenty years of pauses and deferments - which in the meantime have seen the publication of another collaboration between Rossi and Cianciulli, the incendiary CD-EP "Preti pedofili" (Pedophile Priests - Sussidiaria, 2011) - the work was finally completed for Silentes with the use of texts specially commissioned to Vittore Baroni, written completely independently from the music according to a strategy already employed in "Saliva calda" (...Baroni has also randomly fixed the duration of the twelve tracks...). The stylistic coordinates of the album are unsettling as the seaside snapshot taken by Gabriella Marconi used on the cover; they range from free improvisation and bizarre micro-wave electronica to chamber scores and surreal songwriting.

Guided since 1983 by the enigmatic Manitù Rossi, and responsible of a dozen of albums for respected international labels, Le Forbici di Manitù are at their ease with the most disparate sound idioms, from post-industrial noise to pop-rock classics, from electronic minimalism to lounge jazz. Among their most recent projects we'd like to mention: "Tinnitus Tales" (Sussidiaria, 2016), a themed triple album made in collaboration with about fifty musicians and visual artists, "GPS / GaPS" (BAU 14, 2017), a conceptual-situationist neo-serial album released on clear vinyl, "Outside Looking In" (BAU 15, 2018), the first and intimist solo album by Manitù Rossi.