Sixteen months after
Rococo
,
Camera
was released at the end of February.
The two albums form a diptych of twenty tracks.
A trilingual collection (French, Italian, English) of stripped-down songs.
Fabio Viscogliosi, 56, navigates with the same talent from painting to comics (
Cascades, L'Association
), from novels (
Apologie du slow
) to music.
Since the 90s, he has nourished a protean and singular work, which leads him to sign the covers of his albums.
Camera
is the latest occurrence: a concentrate of tenderness and humanity, accessible but iconoclastic, testimony to an adolescent passion for free electrons (Robert Wyatt, David Bowie, Velvet Underground, Lucio Battisti) from which he drew his vocation as a 'artist.
Complete musician (guitar, drums, keyboard, vocals), devoted to his art, Fabio Viscogliosi knows how to do a lot with little, in a humble grammar.
Songwriter
bordering on kitsch and good feelings, he takes over
Mio cure, which
he had written for Vanessa Paradis' last album, without however refraining from gently quirky instrumental tracks.
It is a question of balance.
Fabio Viscogliosi knows how to keep it intact when he invites a string quartet orchestrated by Fred Pallem (
Odyssey
and
Giorni dolci
), in the tradition of
Rococo
, his previous album, and his comrades, Mocke and Chevalrex, from the Objet Disques label.
These lovers of chamber music and curious pop have renewed the air of French song in recent years.
Read also: The strange musical epic of avant-garde Mocke
At Viscogliosi, this feat can also be explained by the Italian roots that he has always cultivated.
Half of
Camera's
titles
are sung in Italian
,
in a variation on the theme of lush sweetness.
Singer, he stretches the words nonchalantly;
multi-instrumentalist, he lets his round melodies hang around.
Fabio Viscogliosi is not a man in a hurry.
He slows down surf music in the title track
Camera
, lets glimpse his small movements under the slow ebb of the waves.
These short and melancholy forms turn on themselves in haunting simplicity.
If
Camera's
songs
were to embody a season, they would stick to a sweaty summer, where silhouettes clad in linen wander.
The complete artist wears tweed well, retro like his psychedelic keyboards (
Nebbia,
Monk
), chic like the donkey-headed alter ego that dresses all his album covers.