On these ten original songs Monti renders the dramatic political history and culture of Italy into animal characters. Sounding passionate, sarcastic, unhinged, and ahead of her time, she uses the stinging words of Italian anti-Fascist writer and persecuted homosexual Aldo Braibant, framed in mysterious found sounds and synthesizer by Alvin Curran - here combining for the first time with Steve Lacy on soprano sax.
Maria Monti acted in films such as Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 along with roles in television. Her musical exploits began in the 1950s in cabaret and by the 1970s she had become something of a dramatic avant-folk artist. ll Bestiario (The Bestiary) has some wild poetic lyrics which can be read in a PDF at the Unseen Worlds site. The track titles translate into such things as "The Peacock," "He Believes The Sheep To Be A Horse," and "The Snake in Love." At the climax of the album are two longer pieces, "The Hibernating" and "Air, Earth, Water and Fire," which seem to allude, as does the whole project, to the value of allowing nature in its many forms to flourish, and to show the corruption of the powerful. In part this stems from real attempts to link sexuality with the politically undesirable, as in the case of the prosecution and four year imprisonment of Braibant; a tool by which to embolden the old order and political right by demonstrating that Communism was corrupting Italian youth and families, and to split the left who—despite the waves of free love and rebellion which climaxed in 1968—were far from universally accepting of homosexuality. Many intellectuals such as Moravia, Eco, and Pasolini protested. Apparently, one of Braibant’s co-defendants was released earlier under the proviso that he live with his parents and only read books that were more than 100 years old.
It is unclear how Curran and Lacy came to be involved with ll Bestiario although both were living in Italy at the time. I like to imagine that someone had heard Lacy’s 1966 live album The Forest and The Zoo almost as much as I want to believe that Curran took inspiration of working with Monti into his own 1975 release Songs and Views of The Magnetic Garden. Maybe it was just that both were living in Italy at the time and were happy to collaborate with a well-known talent such as Monti. For this is not a mere dabble in music by an actress, Monti has released many other records and while neither Curran or Lacy is at their most challenging, the undercurrent sound and arrangements are subtle and intriguing. They have the good sense to allow Monti’s heartfelt and scornful voice to get full rein so that the overall sense is of a real labor of love, at times similar to Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms, but at others a great deal more theatrical.
Guitarists Luca Balbo and Tony Ackerman also feature, along with Roberto Laneri on baritone sax. There is insane cabaret, weird and lovely psychedelic folk, and minimalist avant-expressionism aplenty on this past and future rarity. Il Bestiario was released on the Italian Ri-Fi label in 1974 and this reissue is limited to 500 copies.
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