Bologna, 23 June 2024 – There are compass discs, in the sense that they are a safe anchor and serve to orient oneself, because they read in advance the times that will arrive. Ko de world, the debut album of the Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti, is one of these. In mid-summer of 1993 the CSIs pointed their finger at the map and stopped it in Brittany. Finisterrae, where the world ends, understood as the West (which will be the title of a song on the album in embryo). A privileged place to watch the definitive crumbling of the certainties of the short century.
Taking stock of that summer in Brittany and what it represented Ko de world not only for the personal history of Csi, but also for the overall history of an Italian music scene that was forming, using Italian as its mother tongue to express itself, is Donato Zoppo. In his book Csi. It was once the world (Aliberti publishing company) recounts that risky journey. In that summer the Csi were considered – even before having listened to them – a sort of cold fusion between the former Cccp (Ferretti-Zamboni) and the former Litfiba (the defectors Maroccolo and Magnelli with the addition of the wildcard Canali). Nothing could be more wrong.
It would quickly be discovered that Csi were not – as it might also seem from the acronym chosen for the name – a continuation of Cccp nor a group that would swell the composite Italian rock scene.
They were something else. In those weeks in Brittany, as Zoppo says, almost Gestalt dynamics were created (yes, the group is not the sum of its parts, but the – musical – relationships that flow between them). The place is magical, the perfect observation point to see the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, an unheard alarm for a Europe that has turned the other way. Between the novel and the testimonies of the protagonists, Zoppo reconstructs the story of an album that marked the most recent history of Italian music. Not just independent, because in just three years Csi will reach first place in the sales charts. It will be the beginning of the end yes. Still a lack of air, as in 1990, with different atmospheres and contexts. The fact is that after thirty years returning to that album is an act that takes on a classic nature. Which only over time have we managed to understand and for the most latecomers to discover.
