There are no fully composed songs on Che Mi Guardi Attraverso Una Fiamma. Instead, the Naples-born musician Lucia Sole, working solo as La Festa Delle Rane, sketches brief, shimmering states: gentle glockenspiel taps, plasticky Casio sounds, wavering melodica lines, a childlike voice. Small interior spaces, flickering in candlelight. It is her first physical release since Il Lago E’ Il Cielo Del Bosco E Tutte Le Rane Cantano In Coro (2022, Holiday Records), and the result recalls Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tenniscoats or Eddie Marcon – a deliberately chosen aesthetic of unfinished miniatures in which melancholy and childlike wonder coexist, each intensifying the other.
On »Ti guardavo attraverso uno specchio« (German: Ich beobachte dich durch einen Spiegel), the record’s central piece, one, two, three wheezing organ drones are assembled with spit and adhesive tape before the high-pitched voice slips into the register of a nursery rhyme. Every chord change is marked by a millisecond of silence. An intake of breath. An audible body. A human presence, vulnerable and imperfect.
It is no coincidence that this release appears on cassette. Here, the format is not a nostalgic gimmick but the logical medium for an aesthetic of deliberate incompletion: hiss, warble and mechanical clicking amplify the fragility of the sketches. No filters, no optimisation. The ruptures are not concealed but exposed. Naivety as a stylistic device, imperfection as a programme. An anti-zeitgeist statement stretched across 33 minutes.
