Supermarket
BIO
Supermarket were formed in 2010, initially as a side project of guitarist Alfredo Nuti “dal Portone” who has always been involved, in various roles, in the heart of italian independent music: Extraliscio, Pacifico, Shaloma Locomotiva Orchestra, Saluti da Saturno, Colombre, Jang Senato, Giacomo Toni, NicoNote, Antonio Ramberti, Granturismo, and many others. His name appears as session man or arranger in dozens of records and live collaborations, in a career that ranges from contemporary electronic to Liscio (typically Romagna folk), from South American music to krautrock, from garage punk to jazz, from pop to singer-songwriting.
Supermarket, in fact, rather than identifying an actual band, is an artistic name that refers to various collectives of musicians and different artistic moments that have alternated over the years, in Romagna, under the artistic direction of Alfredo Nuti, characterized by a unique blend of kitsch exoticism and radical experimentation, beach parties and surrealist black humour. The “open” nature of this project and its establishment in the local music scene with tracks that have become “standards” to the public, has favoured the coming and going of an impressive number of musicians (twenty people, just among drummers and bassists!). A significant slice of the Romagna underground was able to find in this project a base camp for experimentation and collective fun, especially in the first live gigs: real wild performances, totally out of control, an always changing number of people on stage (from three to ten) and no time limit (from half an hour to four hours).
Among the founding principles of this oddity, known as “World Music Romagnola,” we find the decision to detach from a specific target, developing its sound directly through its own performances, guided by interactions with different venues and audiences each time. This resulted in a paradox: on one hand, an extraordinary and unexpected demand for concerts (almost a thousand in their career!) and on the other, Supermarket’s absence from official stages and major distribution channels, which, by their nature, require a decidedly more “structured” attitude to promotion and live events. In short: a hilarious, creative mess, impossible to manage and realistically, at that point, with few expectations.
By mid-decade things began to change and it was time to give this turbulent process a less scattered and more recognizable style. The first snapshot of this moment is the recording of “Portobello” (2016), an album recorded on tape, entirely in direct capture, which testifies the group’s live attitude but also the desire for a transition to more stable compositional outcomes and instrumentation. Within the tracks, there is also the intention to unite antithetical poetic and emotional states, which will characterize all future productions.
South America and Japan, noise and “Italian-style” soundtracks, minimalism and guitar virtuosity, mathematical rigor and folk music – Supermarket’s music always arises from such impossible tensions. Today, after a long period of inactivity due to the pandemic, the project restarts trying to learn from this creative and, in some ways, unique history, while at the same time keeping in mind that the musical situation has drastically changed. For a few years (since approximately 2019) Alfredo Nuti has been conceiving solo his latest beast: “Italo Barock(Q)” a very complicated album which tries to give a mental shape to this whole story, while carrying it to its “possible” future, this time in a paradoxical, demystifying and totally electronic form. Once again, the attempt is to transfigure the musical imagery of the 20th century, using elements from both the “exotic” and “cultured” tradition as pure source material, absolutely inert, to be repurposed, without loyalty, within a different context and guided by a different unifying spirit, which permanently changes the original meaning. The result is a postmodern cyberfolk, rooted in the crisis of its own tradition, where even the dance sounds, at a deep level, hide a restlessness, an uneasiness, connatural to the new “Zombie” nature of the musical material being reused. To achieve the variety of sound needed for such an ambitious operation, the instrumentation has also evolved: along with drums, wind sections and electric guitars, now there are also MIDI guitars, modular synthesizers and old digital keyboards, drum machines, vocoders and samplers. Digital, analogue, and acoustic coexist without hierarchies of value, and the vocal parts, which till now had been excluded from an eminently instrumental project, become more numerous. As for the live band, instead of the bedlam of musicians of the past, a dry electronic/acoustic trio was preferred, with two of the earliest Supermarket members: Carlo Vallicelli on drums and electronics, and Marcello “Gianduia” Detti on brass, acoustic percussion and Polynesian shells.
It took ten years of gathering and focusing on their own prerogatives, but it is a bit as if Supermarket have just come to life, evolved, as they are, into something that certainly can no longer be called a “side project”. How to call this “something” hasn’t been figured out yet. Luckily.
discography
Italo Barock(Q)
“Italo Barock(Q) is an album of contradictions: it is cultured music for amateurs, but also dance music for pundits. It is provincial world music, with which you can suddenly find yourself in Romagna after traveling around the world twice, between South America, Europe and Japan. You can rummage through avant-garde and antiquities while enjoying a bit of Martian exotica and cerebral tropicalism, not caring about the difference between serious stuff and taking the piss..” -Alfredo Nuti
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