Cover art by Daniele Morelli
OUI046 : Daniele Morelli - Robert Tiso / Consistenza Umana
The always travelling and experimenting Daniele Morelli (see also ODG047, ODG147, OUI008, OUI036 and OUI037) composed and adjusted his guitar style to team with the great glass harp master musician Robert Tiso for this very original album.
Daniele says:
"I know Robert from a lot of years and it was always fascinating to me the sound of crystal glasses.It's not an easy instrument and Robert is the best in Italy and not only there.Trying to do something together I thought an album inspired to this asylum was the perfect combination (guitars and glass harp) for pictures, emotions and sounds. That's the perfect sound for an album like that!"
Robert and Daniele
The sound of a wine glass may be familiar to most people, but the voice of the glass harp is always a surprise to everyone. Its tones have been described as "celestial", meaning they sound like they come from another world, and lead the listener into a mesmerizing and ethereal atmosphere.
The glass harp, or more commonly musical glasses, consists in a set of stem glasses of different sizes and shapes, fixed to a wooden base. Each glass is tuned by adjusting the quantity of water it contains.
The sound is produced simply by rubbing the moistened fingertips along the rims, the friction causes the vibration that makes the glasses resonate.
With this enchanting musical sound Robert Tiso performs a repertoire of classical masterpieces by Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky... and many others, each piece carefully chosen to suit the sound and arranged to express the full potential possibilities of the glass harp.
Continuously evolving his performing style, Robert Tiso has been appreciated and acclaimed worldwide as one of the few glass harp masters of the present.
9 tracks with guitars and crystal glasses by the inimitable Robert Tiso.
9 pieces dedicated to the history of the Volterra mental hospital.
9 songs made of human consistency.
'Consistenza Umana' is an album dedicated to a place, a person and their combined history.
The place is Volterra, a town in Tuscany, that hosted the largest mental asylum in Italy for over a century. The Volterra mental asylum became both home and prison to 5000 people during the First and Second World Wars. It was very easy to end up in a mental hospital: alcohol, homosexuality, and trauma from the war were all diagnoses, not given as a path to treatment but rather as a method to marginalize and exclude troubled people from society. The nurses themselves said that they did not follow any courses of treatment, instead they acted liked prison guards.
The “treatments” were straitjackets and electroshock. Walking through the ruins of the mental hospital, one perceives that, for over a century, people were interned here, each with a different story, each with their different trauma and pain. From the beginnings of psychiatry until the final closure of mental asylums in 1979 society decided who to marginalize often because they didn't fit societal norms. But seen up close, is anyone normal?
And the person is Oreste Fernando Nannetti. Among the many stories from Volterra, his in particular has captured the imagination of many people.
We don't know much about him, only that he was the son of a young, single mother, had been sent to an orphanage in Rome, his hometown, at the age of seven., was discharged in his adolescence, then disappeared until 1948 when he was charged with resisting arrest and judged to be mentally ill. Nannetti spent the rest of his life inside the Volterra asylum, moving from the "Ferri" pavilion to the "Charcot", dedicated to the agitated and dangerous. In reality, from what we know, he likely wasn’t a particularly problematic patient. The nurses allowed him to spend two hours outside every day. In the courtyard, he did not spend his time with the other patients. Taciturn and elusive, he preferred to be alone and used the buckle of his waistcoat to engrave his thoughts and reflections on the asylum walls, giving life to his inner world… and his communications with aliens.
The stories engraved on the plaster walls, sometimes accompanied by drawings and graphics, in some cases reflected his psychosis and in others his incredible lucidity.
He was methodical, dividing spaces on the walls to create large frames in which he jotted down stories of life in the asylum, messages received from other galaxies, and news relating to his past. He used a boustrophedonic script, alternating Italian letters with Etruscan characters. He often wrote as if tracing the silhouettes of the other patients sitting on the benches next to the wall; lines that bent and rose, making decoding them even more difficult. Nannetti also wrote of wars between planets aimed at conquering unknown worlds. In the hundreds of words he wrote, Nannetti describes himself as "Mr Nanof, astronautic mining engineer of the mental space-time system" and “NOF4”, an acronym which he composed from his name, Nannetti Oreste Fernando, and the number 4 whose origin remains uncertain.
Both Nannetti and Volterra continue to be a mystery and an inspiration. And so this album was born—guitars and crystal glasses—to tell through sounds the imagined stories of Nannetti and Volterra, stories filled with pain, sadness, joy, wonder and grief, all trapped within the walls of the Volterra mental asylum.
Now NOF4 is considered an important artist and a piece of his wall is in The Collection de L’Art Brut in Lausanne.
Volterra: “the land that flies.”
Mixed by Daniele Morelli
Matered by Lucio Jimenez
Produced by Daniele Morelli and Robert Tiso
Daniele Morelli guitars
Robert Tiso glass harp
All compositions by Daniele Morelli
Digital release on the 17th of September 2024.
Track listing:
1: Consistenza umana
2: Ombre
3: Il Colonnello Astrale
4: Fibbia Catodica
5: Sistema Telepatico
6: Veleni Anarcotici
7: Antenna Atomica
8: Raggi Magnetici
9: Zellige
Itunes, Spotify, etc.:
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