So much good news for Paolo Ferrarini I don't know where to start!

Sorry not to have posted in so long - I've been on holiday to Devon. Very nice holiday but it's good to be back and to be able (at last) to devote myself to starting a new business and spreading the word about Paolo's music.

Hopefully now I don't have to work office hours I can actually use this blog to make a more signifcant contribution to helping Paolo reach a wider audience. I'm all for that.

Speaking of which, I received three very exciting Paolo Ferrarini-related pieces of news today...

I will start with this one.

Paolo has been featured on a website called www.tuttouomini.it

If you have a good command of Italian, check out what they had to say here.

If however, like me, your Italian is a little rusty, try this translation instead:

"Paolo Ferrarini's 'Gravity'.

Paolo Ferrarini is a young musician from Verona. 'Gravità' is the first single taken from his new album 'Paradigmi Gnoseologici'...

We would like to invite you to watch the videoclip of this song, which is in fact much more than a simple videoclip. It has very deep and meaningful contents and is one of the few openly gay, serious works we are aware of.

The video was presented at the Roma3 Film Festival earlier in June 2008.

It is a very committed work, which we recommend everyone to see and follow closely".

Not bad eh?

The second piece of good news was that there is a second label interested in financing the printing of Paol's forthcoming album, Gnoseological Paradigms, which will include a booklet with pictures and lyrics.

But the very best piece of news I save for last.

Paolo is coming to to work in London for three months, starting in September, and so the promotion of his album, Gnoseological Paradigms will start here in the UK, which hopefully means that I can help out after all! (If he lets me!)

I was already feeling chipper today, but now I feel like cavorting, so please excuse me while I go dancing down the road....

Homophobic Faggot: Love Song For A Closet Gay

I was cruising YouTube for alternative gay music and this is what I found - and it, in turn, led me to other very interesting and often amusing videos. [How did I ever live without YouTube and why did it take me so long to investigate!]

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to really look through all his videos but I liked this one:



I can't hear all the lyrics but whatever they are, I thought the video was really cool.

The guy is known on YouTube as bcurious2. So far I have been able to find out the following:

He's gay, into making alternative music (so far as I have gotten, it appears to often be gay-themed); he's a 4th generation atheist; his grandparents formed an atheist movment; he loves languages and was raised tri-lingual (although he has picked up several languages since then; he's a painter & a video artist and has two day jobs to pay the bills and he is more interested in the future than the past.

I got this information from here, which led me on to find another YouTube Gem, boniac [The Reapers Pit] who I found to be very entertaining indeed. I started with this one:



and I'm looking forward to watching more of both of them and I hope you enjoy them too!

Pictures from the set of the video for Gravita

Watch the video now on YouTube...

Lyrics in Esperanto

Well it's been hard to find out what Paolo's been up to lately - from what I can tell he is extremely busy with finishing his album, Gnoseological Paradigms. He has been promoting it in Italy, and trying to decide on artwork to go with it etc. Hence all my tangents into language and Esperanto. These tangents have turned out to be of more relevance than I had first thought though...

Busy as he is, Paolo has been keeping an eye on this blog and was very interested in the response from the Esperanto readers, who have kindly commented and offered insights into Esperanto, language in general and places I can get started with it, which has been great [thanks everyone :-D).

He told me that he was intrigued to find out more about Esperanto; that it had such a great following and that there was such a lively debate about it's existence and it's future. He was also interested in it from a linguistic point of view and he was pretty enthusiastic about the potential for including a song or songs in Esperanto on his next album - as some of you may or may not already be aware, Paolo experiments with many different languages and linguistic concepts in his music. He wondered whether there were any other musicians or writers using Esperanto as their principal medium - does anyone know?

He told me that his next album will include a song in Bahasa Indonesian, which is another artificially-created language which is also spoken by quite a few people. Esperanto seems like a logical choice and ripe for further investigation!

So as soon as I have finished training my replacements at work, and gone on holiday to Devon, I'll be able to give my study of Esperanto (and all the issues surrounding it) much more attention. So there will be more Esperanto for me come August!

If anyone is interested in finding out more about Paolo's take on language, linguistics and music, [and if you haven't already] why not check out the YouTube videos below, where he talks about it more eloquently than I ever could - [although please bear in mind that neither of us wrote the subtitles, which are ok but not perfect! x]

Gravita - Some inside insights into it's creation from p[ aolo]

So I was chatting to Paolo recently and I found out some stuff about the song Gravita that I thought I would share with the blog.

In case you haven't seen/heard Gravita yet, here's your opportunity:




1:.The Title

The song is in English but Paolo chose to give it an Italian title as an homage to a question that was often put to him when he lived in London, namely as to whether his dreams were in Italian or in English. Paolo says he doesn't actually know for sure and guesses that it's probably a mixture of both. I know from experience that if you wake Paolo suddenly he is more likely to speak to you in Italian but hey...

Anyway, knowing that he had probably given all sorts of answers to the same question he decided to reproduce this inconsistency between the title (i.e. what he thought his dreams were like) and the actual content of the song.

2. The syntax of Gravita's made up dream language

Apparently this made up language is not as random as it may sound at first. In fact this made-up language of dreams, as featured on the track, is, I am reliably informed, made up of universal phonemes, and it also has a syntax.

The "words" come back in different combinations, but they are [theoretically at least] recognisable as independent words, not just random sounds. There, you see, method behind seeming madness!

3. The events behind the song: Not being able to fall in love

I always want to know what a song's supposed to be 'about'. I'm sure that most people imprint their own 'abouts' onto songs, whether it's a positive or negative feeling/event/etc. is by the by. The song and the video both impart a sense of unrequited love - the video does so in what I can only assume is an intentionally controversial portrait of unrequited love. And a very beautiful portrait it is too.

But knowing what a song is about - i.e. what it means or what it meant to the artist at the time of writing sometimes adds extra dimensions to my listening pleasure so it may please you [or not] to know what I know of the 'about' for Gravita:

Back in 2001, Paolo was torn between falling or not falling in love with a guy called Francesco. He was in Cairo and Francesco was in Berlin. I knew that Paolo was going through something difficult with this relationship but he didnt seem keen to really talk about it much at the time. I have since been told by Paolo that he found himself caught between surrendering to his feelings and obeying his misgivings about the relationship - at that time he didn't feel that he could give himself to the relationship without sustaining real damage to his dignity. More than that I don't know, except that the pink shirt in the video is a visual reference to Francesco, who was apparently wearing a shirt of the same colour the first night he and Paolo went out together.

I don't know if anyone else is interested in things like this, but for me, I always like to know new things...[except when I don't] :-D

Linguistics, Music and Rebuilding The Rights of Statues (The RE-TROS)

I have just been reading a very interesting post on a blog called Crispy Quips, which is written by an American Linguistics major called Chris, who wants to teach English as a foreign lanaguage after graduation.

Chris has two sites, Cripsy Quips, which is a more general blog, and then one which is appears to be devoted to a more formal look at lingusitics - which is interesting for me to read, but not something I can really participate in as meaningfully as I would probably like to as I have never really studied linguistics.

(It occurs to me that this may become necessary if I'm going to be promoting Paolo's music but hey, one step at a time, right?!)

Anyway, while looking to find out what the Internet has to say about the relationship between music and linguistics, I found Chris's blogs, via one post in particular, that talks about a Chinese band called "Rebuilding the Rights of Statues (or the RE-TROS, for short,) who apparently circumnavigate government censorship by singing in English and submitting fake translations of their lyrics to the authorities.

Below is one of their videos, called Hang Police and if you would like to find out a little more about how they got away with that particular title, read his post about them here.



I thought they were definitely worth posting about for the audacity of their idea alone, (not the mention the fact that their tactics are not only bold and clever but working - so far). I will reserve judgement about their music for now, as it's not a sound that I can profess to love right away, but often that is the case for me with many new artists, so I will live with the music for a little while and see if it grows on me.

The point is, whatever you think of their music, their success appears to indicate that Paolo is not alone in believing that a strategic marriage of music and linguistics may indeed present many opportunities that a more ordinary communication does not - opportunities that in turn may offer the potential for explosive, and one hopes, enduring change - for the better?

New Video - Producer Max Titi talks about working on Paolo Ferrarini's forthcoming album "Paradigmi Gnoseologici"

This video is very interesting for many reasons, but, if I may say so, (and I may because it's my blog,) it will live in my heart forever by way of a line that occurs very early on:

"Can you give me the sound of a moth?"

Which is only topped by a following comment:

"Of course there are no moths in the studio"

How can Max be so sure? Did he check? Did he mothball the place against such an eventuality?

Seriously, although quite technical it's a great insight into the process that Paolo (and his collaborators) have gone through in order to come up with this album, which I am still awaiting, very impatiently. There will be eight tracks, I hear, and I have six. Give me the other two!

Paolo Ferrarini: An Introduction: Parts 1 & 2

This is Paolo, explaining what he's all about.

Just to give you an idea of what to expect, he talks about the following:

* [Linguistics] (including music as language)
* [Philosophy]
* [Catholicism]
* [Atheism] (including music as a way to atheism)
* [Sexuality], [homosexuality] and [gay identity]
* [Activism]

These are some of my favourite quotes from the interviews:

[concerning his artistic vision]

“In my artistic and also my activist’s vision [...] [I want] to transform the general perception [of homosexuality] in such a way that strolling in a park, hand in hand with another boy will finally become a gesture of affection, and no longer a political provocation, a slap in the face of the silent majority. I’d like to get to the point of doing it with total nonchalance, without even worrying about peoples’ gazes. I doubt I will live to enjoy such a privilege.”

"One thing is certain, I couldn’t have been gay and a catholic! I would have felt like a black guy with a subscription to the KKK, or like a Jew, perversely serving in the SS."

[what is [god]?]

"We are talking about a linguistic label devoid of entity, a fancy wrapping without a product, a nothing around which we build a sophisticated, folkloric structure that is metaphorical in nature. It is strongly delusional, to the extent that only a few get to the point of questioning what that metaphor really refers to. As a linguist with an interest in cognitive sciences, the label of atheist does not really fit me, in that I don’t consider [god] to be a mystery or a matter of faith. I know exactly what [god] is and where it dwells. [god] is a metaphor with no referent, a nothing that exists in the skulls of people who use it as a conceptual category to interpret reality."

I'll let you find the other gems for yourselves!

The subtitles are a work in progress - they were dictated by P[aolo] over the phone to another Italian speaker. When you bear that in mind, it's a pretty good job! I understand that this issue will be addressed at some point but in the mean time, they get the point across well enough, to my mind.

So settle back, listen and enjoy! Feel free to comment too, we like interactivity!