Eugenio Finardi: “In this violent and cynical world, the thing that scares me least is artificial intelligence”

The seventies are long gone. The political battles, the commitment to a better world, the power of music that can change everything, are indelible but perhaps anachronistic memories. But Eugenio Finardi, 71 years old, he has never stopped believing: «The truth? I still feel like a companion, but I don’t know whose. Not the ones from fifty years ago. And not even those who are building a violent and cynical world, where selfishness and ignorance triumph. I feel like a companion of those who work daily for the poorest, of those who oppose environmental destruction and attacks on democracy, of those who fight for freedom. We slaughter each other like animals, we waste billions of dollars bombing, destroying cities, massacring children. I trust in Artificial Intelligence. I don’t fear it. You cannot be more stupid than this humanity »says the extraterrestrial of Italian song before one of the many concerts that still take him to travel every kilometer of the peninsula and observe Italy changing from the stage.

In 2023 she was awarded two prestigious awards, the Tenco Lifetime Achievement Award and the Trinnanzi Award for Poetry.
«Both awards pleasantly surprised me. They recognized a poetic value in my lyrics. I have never dared to think of a poetic figure for my songs. I had the honor of meeting great poets, with extreme respect for those figures, I never ventured comparisons. Fifty years after the release of my first single, these awards make me reevaluate my long musical adventure. A career that I have always mistreated. The fact that this long research process is promoted to poetic value makes me feel welcomed. These awards, precisely in the year of the publication of new album “Euphonia” they are amazing. One of those flashes that you no longer expect at ever age.”

How did this new musical project of yours come about?
«During the lockdown, in a deserted Milan. Like everyone else, I was confined at home, I felt it was necessary to instill hope. I was struck by the statement of a neurologist-musician. He explained that all musical genres aim for the same result, that of transcending. Mantras, vibrations, rhythms, choirs, transport us towards higher states of consciousness. So I thought about composing a suite. A composition constructed as a continuous subtraction. For the new show I eliminated any contamination, caption, speech, explanation. The suite is divided into verses of songs, hints and improvisations. Addressing the public a bizarre, unsettling request, that of not clapping or clapping as a necessary gesture. The idea is to create an uninterrupted flow of music free from any genre conditioning. Sliding from Jazz to Blues, from Fado to Neapolitan music, from Scarlatti to John Cage. A suite that allows you to establish a connection with the Cosmos. A form of spirituality, even for a lay person like me. From my father I inherited this need to search for the Absolute. He was a stubborn man from Bergamo. He had gone to Berlin to study the advent of music in cinema at Siemens. At Cinecittà he was among the first to introduce soundtracks into films. He was a man with great sensitivity. Maybe it’s my age, but I feel this need for the Absolute more and more urgent.”

Has the time come for a Battiato-style mystical phase for you too?
«Franco was a great traveling companion on this long musical journey. He played on my first album under the name Frank Ionia. I met him in the office of Gianni Sassi’s Cramps Records record company. He was sitting on a sofa, a messy bush of hair, his face covered with white greasepaint, space goggles, stars and stripes trousers, and high boots. That photographic image then became the icon of an advertising campaign that made history. He was the only one in Italy to own a BES 3 electronic synthesizer. I did my first Sanremo with a song written by Battiato. I was present the day he decided to make a change in his career. They challenged him to write a popular, very successful song, like those of Pooh. He didn’t get upset, he accepted the challenge. He totally mastered the mechanisms of musical composition. This is how he gave birth to those great unrepeatable successes that we know. However, rather than locking himself in an ivory tower, in everyday life he was uniquely friendly. I have therefore seen him transform from provocateur to experimenter, up to the level of unrivaled master. He invented his own extraordinary sound. With Filippo Destrieri and Alberto Radius, they spent entire days searching for a particular sound, with Franco never satisfied. The last time we met was during a big Christmas event in Grotte di Castellana. He joined me on stage and started talking to me as if resuming a conversation he had interrupted shortly before. He announced to me his next trip to Armenia in the footsteps of Gurdjieff. I perceived a different state of Franco. As if he, for the second time, had freed himself to access another stage of awareness.”

You were literally born from a note…
«My mother was an opera singer. Her name was Eloise Degenring, she spoke with a funny English accent like Shel Shapiro. She always told me that in the room she gave birth, she intoned the high note of Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” and she gave birth to me. At a certain point in her life she could no longer take the stage. She decided to give singing lessons. During those lessons I listened to different vocal techniques. I learned to sing like this, using different vocal registers. This is a theme that has always fascinated me and which I have refined thanks to great meetings like the one with Carmelo Bene. Especially with Demetrio Stratos, who was like a brother to me. He took me to my first record company, where I met Gianni Sassi.”

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She is still the extraterrestrial of Italian music.
«Extraterrestrial is perhaps my best known song but when it came out it was greeted by controversy. They accused me of attacking the Movement. This is because the B-side of the single was titled Reflux. It was a phenomenon that was coming from afar, it was in the air, I perceived it like the Indians who in the films, putting their ear to the ground, hear the gallop of distant horses. I gave him a name. For over twenty years I have no longer been part of the official record system, deciding to become an independent producer of my works. All this, obviously, turns not only into an economic loss, it also equates to being expelled from the dynamics of television broadcasts. To go on television, you have to belong to some sort of Disneyland tribe. You have to be a phenomenon, transform yourself into a mask. I left the record industry to pursue a dream of freedom. I felt the need to produce music that was useful, not products to be consumed. A sort of wonderful early retirement. Every evening I find myself in a new theater, involved and involving people who respect me. Is there a more fascinating way to be a pensioner? In the end, curiously, they really turned me into an extraterrestrial. They even dedicated an asteroid to me: it suits me, did I want a star to go away to? And they gave it to me. The asteroid Eugeniofinardi, a piece of frozen rock as big as Everest.”

It also celebrates half a century with its Parco Lambro festival.
«We designed it in Terrasini, with Mauro Rostagno and some friends responsible for the magazine Re Nudo. I arrived in Terrasini after eleven hours by train, they tell me that not much has changed. We decided that Lambro park would host the first proletariat youth music festival. They were wonderful years of collective thought. Music was designed to bring people together. It was a flow of energy that literally ran through the bodies of both the musicians and the audience. Then the world changed. In those years we were four billion in the world, now we are double and we think singular”

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Having been a rebel, can you understand Trapper music?
«I listen to them with curiosity, as one must do for every new phenomenon. I know many of them. They are kids who live in San Siro, my neighborhood. Sometimes they use musical references from the past. The culture they propose is the one we are living. Did we want to cancel every ideology, every thought? And this is the result…”