Simona Zamboli :: Requiem (Detroit Underground)

Requiem is Simona Zamboli’s unflinching musical meditation on suffering and creativity, transforming grief, resilience, and radical acceptance into a starkly beautiful electronic passage through life’s darker seasons.

A requiem for resilience

The established interplay between seasons of dark nights of the soul and conscious creativity has been routinely highlighted before. Simona Zamboli’s latest Detroit Underground album offering Requiem is a musical articulation of that very correlation. With sleeve notes openly disclosing an enduring descent into the shadows and shades of modern living and breathing, the album proposes a complex relationship to the sanctuary of creativity, whilst unavoidably attending to difficulty and grief. The yin and the yang of it, with even more yin and even more yang. Musical production becomes scaffolding here, holding the structures of moribund daily routine afloat on the rivers of existence. What one can draw from this is resilience, and the capacity to mirror precisely the same when it is inevitably our turn to traverse similar landscapes. That, I totally get.

Listening to the opening track “Can’t breathe in this place” reveals a tension and tone of heightened awareness, one confronted with hardened reality. It is the sound of turning one’s face towards strife and away from the dis-ease of avoidance and denial. Stammering filtered beats roll and tumble across the highs and lows of proceedings as synths jab at gums through gritted teeth. But this is not a difficult ride. It is an expression of inevitability, and a profound acceptance of that which can be heard, can be tasted in the mouth of the music. It’s serious. It’s mature. It knows what it wants to say and it articulates it with wisdom and creative rigor. Quite the brilliant thing.

“We are not merely told of the map required to traverse life’s difficulties, but shown the very path itself, and then accompanied on the walk.” ~Will Wonks

“Escape techniques” is a title that suggests the self-soothing methods one might deploy to distract oneself in an effort to manage discomfort. Life is indeed suffering, and the mood here reflects that truth. Percussion pans ear to ear in syncopated abandon as Simona shapes discordant melodies, the bottom-end notes prodding and shattering any denial one might harbor about whether distraction is functional over time. By the end of the track, one is left in no doubt: no, the only way out of hardship really is straight through the middle of it. A musical accompaniment to the idea that the truth really will set us free, even if at first it is unpalatable.

Title track “Requiem” aches with the inalienable tension of reality that courses through suffering. Its mood is hard. Its sound is shaped the same. Digital clips and tribal beats undulate beneath fragile chords spoon fed as emotional sustenance. The expression here is that of hurt: it must be felt, it must be expressed, but it will not endure despite its apparent power. To never encounter a means of articulation with quite this degree of clarity, this finely tuned, is to risk being ensnared by limitless emotional atrophy. The minute of silence that closes the track—whether intentional, accidental, or imagined—communicates an emptiness, an invitation to sit with and authentically feel what has been triggered, that it took me some time to even check whether another track follows. A hymnal opus. A breathtaking pices of work.

Creativity born from darkness ::

“Sad joy in Geneva” owns its full ten minutes as it swims through fallen tears of loss and healing. Weeping to communicate to others that we are suffering. Weeping to heal the lens through which we see life more clearly. Weeping so that we suffer less. Spacious, liquid synths and sparse beats weave over lamenting melodies as we stop, pause, and let it all fall away. An electronic lament that releases so much and so many losses. There is grace here—emotional maturity given by risking enough to get this real. The feminine path of the ages, traversed by wisdom teachers large and small, young and old alike. A visceral sense of innate necessity. An accompanying sound sculpture for radical acceptance, given as a gift for daring to be this real. Music for rarified air.

We close out with “Varne.” It pushes and pushes. It clamors and leans. It projects and directs. Machine beats rip and tear. Toms roll and collapse into and through themselves as tones nag and shake with projected fears for an unknown that never arrives. The effect is sobering, grounding us in the practicality of life’s difficulties. Before suffering, we must do the washing. After suffering, we must do the washing. Yet from the first beat of the album to the brief end, we have been given the gift of being with Simona as she passed through, re-carving the path of the ages for us to follow. The wisdom of her unavoidable undertaking is on open-hearted display: we are not merely told of the map required to traverse life’s difficulties, but shown the very path itself, and then accompanied on the walk. What a humbling offering. A Requiem for the Way, for sure.

Requiem is available on Detroit Underground. [Bandcamp]