Los Angeles - 30 after Roy, 34 after Ridley

Opening scene from the "Blade Runner 2049" teaser trailer 

Since the first time I watched it on a tv channel in the mid nineties, I've used to pay a periodic visit to that rusty and gloomy Los Angeles set in the imaginary vintage future conceived by Ridley Scott, Jordan Cronenweth, Syd Mead and Philip K. Dick. 

 I got so accustomed to its hazy and cyber-gothic mood that I've often transposed and filtered it into my artworks, tales and movies, specially "EDOnism", filmed 6 years ago in some Tokyo locations dramatically reminiscent of Animoid Row, some of them enriched by a night snow that now seems to have replaced the rain in the upcoming installment.

 

Up and down: stills from "EDOnism" directed by Alessandro Fantini and produced by Lorenzo Fantini in 2010.

Honestly I never expected to see an "updated" version of "Blade Runner" 34 years after its (initially unsuccessful) release.  As many other admirers of that vision, I still consider it a contained (thin) story whose strenght relies mostly on its swarming congeries of visual details, plot holes and paranoid ambiguities that don't need to be clarified at all. Actually I find quite hard to define it a traditional movie, as I prefer to think about it as an emotive sandbox or a sparkling acquarium where I can see my irrational thoughts swimming like weird fishes of the deep (a proof of the spiritual poignancy of this metaphor, again, can be appreciated in the love sequence of "EDOnism").

Nevertheless, my first reaction to the teaser of 19th December was warily optimistic. Its unsettling and enigmatic tone was quite close to what I've imagined keeping in mind all the news and behind-the-scene info, concept art and photos released over the last 6 months. Highly commendable is the way the Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and famed DOP Roger Deakins have homaged the slow pace of the scene of Deckard exploring the Bradbury building and the orange stillness of the first "Tyrell sequence" of the '82 movie (even though I suspect this new scene isn't set on Earth, or probably is a "memory" inserted in someone's brain related to the "desert" mentioned during the VK test of Holden) as well as the music sounds like a fitting Trent Reznor's rearrangement of some elements excerpted from the original Vangelis sonic dome. Despite I hoped this wasn't  just a remix conceived for the trailer but a little taste of the overall style of the final soundtrack, a couple days later the composer Johann Johannsson (who already collaborated with Villeneuve for "Sicario", "Prisoners" and "Arrival") stated that none of that belongs to his new score in progress.

 Ryan Gosling, aka "LAPD officer K", enters the deserted temple-casino that has become the new shelter of Deckard (and his four-legged companion).

Admittedly, so far the only element of the trailer that didn't really convinced me is the new scruffy and "Han Solo-esque" look of Deckard, but this appearence could find a "raison d'être" in the  more "low-profile" life style adopted by the retired replicant hunter. Even the new photos featured on the last Entertainment Weekly, clearly taken on set during the pauses between shooting (and probably not really representative of the final aesthetic), show a different, less grit and dark mood compared to the '82 movie.  It's all up to Villeneuve and who will decide the final cut to make sure this tonal shift will pay off on the big screen on the next 6th October, inheriting and enriching (not replicating) the poetic soul of the first masterwork. Otherwise, he knows its fate will be to get lost in time "like tears in snow".

O40

I managed to meet Jean-Michel Jarre for the first time last summer, while my brother Nicola was in serious lack of oxygene, since he was dying of pulmonary adenocarcinoma at 49. I told him how much my brother loved his music and used to play it to me when I was a child, introducing me to the musical realm that inspired most of my visual artworks. He had a special attachment to the Oxygene tape he played over and over on his car stereo. Jarre asked me what his name was and signed the cover of an Oxygene lp for him.
It was one of the most intense and symbolic moment of my life, since the art book I gave him contained also my painting dedicated to the 30th anniversary of “Oxygene” depicting two lungs filled with the liquid oxygene dripping from the Antarctic of a dying earth.
My brother died few hours after watching the photos of my meeting with Jarre. A vital cycle was ending, as well as a long season of my life. Another Life was going to breath again through Art and Memory.

That's what Oxygene has meant to me and my brother.

My photos of the meeting and some artworks inspired by his music are currently featured on Jarre's official website:http://jeanmicheljarre.com/oxygeneseries

SUBversio (Pantheon of Hype)

SUBversio (Pantheon of Hype) by AFANTINI on DeviantArt

AFAN Alessandro Fantini
SUBversio (Pantheon of Hype) (2016)
Oil and chalk pastels on canvas, 80x60 cm.

ANTALGICA - The new Alessandro Fantini's album

Alessandro Fantini - ANTALGICA

Between mind and body the pain is the invisible organ pumping blood into soul. 

 

Due to very gloomy circumstances occurred in my recent life, after the release of my latest concept album “Son of chasm” I started to work on several ideas linked to the theme of pain and suffering. Not just the notion of physical pain, but the metaphysical experience of sorrow and how humans deal with it over their lifetime: the pain of birth, of growing up, of loss, of separation,  of public judgement, of death. Hence, I decided to follow a more abstract creative route, without hinting at a narrative structure but trying to establish a pure emotive soundscape. My early plan was to develop through different styles the moods evoked by the first two instrumental tracks composed during winter, “Wealthy doom” and “Antalgica”.
Yet, as soon as I've completed the first instrumental draft of the song "Blazing frost" in December, I've started hearing a disembodied female voice flying over the icy vastness evoked by the piano notes. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by my childhood memories of the Finnish tundra depicted in some folk tales books I used to contemplate for hours in my bedroom, specially those illustrated by Rien Poortvliet, Brian Froud and Alan Lee. At the same time I recalled the ethereal unplugged songs performed by Anna Vihonen, a young talented Finnish singer I've discovered on the web a couple of years ago when she started following me on my Fandalism page. When she enthusiastically replied to my invite to contribute her vocals to this track by saying she was looking forward to experiment with electronic music since a long time, I realized that actually this song came out from the depths of a poetic ecosystem inhabited by both of us, so distant in space but so close in spirit.

So I came up with some lyrics describing the growth of a little girl from her kindergarten years to womanhood and I proposed her to sing in a series of songs where she had to play the character of this girl as a spirit of uncontaminated nature in her embryonic state, before facing the fear and distress of dealing with her peers and adult people, then with the pain of physical metamorphosis of adolescence and, eventually, the loss of her identity in the cauldron of social networks.

Despite the main concept may sound sombre and even pessimistic, the album is meant to be experienced as a spiritual healing therapy, a cathartic fresco made of sounds, pictures and words, because if music and art won’t ever cure any disease or treat human agony, it can be for sure a better medicine for the soul with no side effects or harmful ones. An Antalgic device helping to cope with the gap we have to cross between the two defining mysteries of our life.

ANTALGICA
1.Wealthy Doom (overture) 04:56
2.Antalgica 06:16
3. Blazing frost 05:39
4.Gartenmares 04:57
5.Mitosis 04:48
6.The Great Burden 05:20
7.Aponia, first movement 05:05
8.Aponia, second movement 08:14
9.Leaving Aphinar 04:36

Composed, performed, recorded and produced by Alessandro Fantini.
Lyrics, vocals and effects by Alessandro Fantini.
Vocals on "Blazing Frost", "Gartenmares", "Mitosis" and "Aponia (movement II)" by ARIANA aka Anna Vihonen.

©AFANSOUND
©ARIANA

The Great Burden

"The Great Burden" from the new upcoming Alessandro Fantini's album "Antalgica".
Composed, perfomed, mixed and produced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
Lyrics, vocals and effects by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
Artwork by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.

Aponia, second movement (excerpt)

AFAN Alessandro Fantini - Aponia, second movement (excerpt) (2016)
Excerpt from the new AFAN Alessandro Fantini's album "ANTALGICA".


Composed, performed, mixed and produced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini
Vocals by ARIANA aka Anna Vihonen sampled by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
Cover art: detail from AFAN Alessandro Fantini's painting "The surrender of seasons", oil on canvas, 2016.

© AFAN SOUND, Alessandro Fantini and ARIANA

Mitosis (excerpt)

AFAN&ARIANA
Mitosis (2016)

Excerpt from the upcoming AFAN Alessandro Fantini's album "ANTALGICA"
Music composed, performed and produced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
Lyrics by Alessandro Fantini.
Vocals by ARIANA aka Anna Vihonen https://soundcloud.com/arianafinland
Cover art by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.

© AFAN SOUND, Alessandro Fantini and ARIANA

FUNERAL ORATION FOR MY BROTHER

My brother Fantini Nicola passed away in the evening of Monday, July 11th 2016.
The following is the translation of the speech I've delivered at the end of the funeral rites on July 13th.

FUNERAL ORATION FOR MY BROTHER 

When I was a child my brother Nicolino represented to me a second fatherly figure, the cornerstone of the family along with my father and grandfather. My parents and my grandfather could always count on him for the housework and the fields work. For me and my brother Giampiero, he was an incomparable example of honesty, dedication and kindness. He never spared himself when it came to roll up his sleeves and to solve large and small problems. He suffered deeply when my grandfather left us after a long agony 23 years ago. He has always followed with pride my artistic activities, often doing everything to help me in setting up my local exhibitions. He felt fulfilled when he formed a beautiful family with Filomena, with whom he shared everything until the very end, growing their son Joseph with the affection and the unique example of a father who was a friend, a confidant and a moral guide, an ironic motivator and a companion of adventures. Everybody respected and loved him as showed by the large crowd of relatives, colleagues and friends gathered here.
We will never forget the day he found out he had a lung cancer, an adenocarcinoma with pleural effusion. The doctor who followed him after the first diagnosis, told me that we had to stop worrying. According to him we had to accept the cycles of chemo that he knew were useless and harmful. We had to quit looking for more effective and less damaging treatments. We had to quit looking for famed oncologists. We would have been happy only when he would have passed away. The only medicine is death, he said.
Now unfortunately that medicine has had its effect. My brother has finally found the cure that we have sought in vain over 8 months in the attempt to fight the advance of his deadly disease and relieve his agony.
Yet, I'm afraid there is no medicine for the Disease plaguing many other people who will probably live longer than him.
This incurable Disease has many names: it’s called cynicism, opportunism, profiteering, indifference, individualism.
It’s the same Disease affecting the doctor who told me he loved walking in cemeteries, having fun by counting the months that remained to live to his patients treated with toxic substances inside his oncology department that was, actually, an antechamber to the morgue.
It’s the Disease affecting those oncologists who drive Porsche cayenne, take a tan at the Seychelles, play tennis, hold conferences on cancer research around the world, and earn hundreds of Euros just to give a bored look at the patient still unaware to be sentenced to death.
It’s the Disease tormenting those surgeons who like to appear on television to praise the wonders of videothoracoscopy and immunotherapy, but who don’t show up to recommend a treatment of antibiotics to prevent postoperative sepsis.
It’s the Disease that eats away those doctors who called “an extraordinary favour” the assistance given to my dying brother who, along with his wife, every week faced gruelling train travels in a wheelchair between Milan and Pescara, pushed only by the energy of despair.
It’s the Disease that consumes that nurse who scolded my mother and my relatives for bringing my brother to the emergency room ‘cause he desperately wanted to avoid death by suffocation in his bedroom.
May God have mercy on all of them because they are sick with no termination date and they don’t know it.
May God have mercy on those who still insist on not seeing or understanding, or worse, pretend not seeing nor understanding that the Sangro Valley, after decades of development and prosperity, has begun again to swarm with death as in the old age of malarial swamps.
Now I like to remember a September day of two years ago, when we went to the mountains and sighted a herd of deers in love, staying for a long time listening to their belling: I hope that now he’s climbing the highest and brightest peak following that call of life, so he will forever forget the deadly and cruel cackle of human hypocrisy.
To Filomena and Joseph I say that the family will be more united and stronger than before, because you will never lack the support, the courage and the strength to plan the future. The future that Nicolino kept getting turned on within himself like a flame until his last breath.
Because during these dreadful months, together with him we realized that there will never be any real cure as long as the Human Being will not be considered a World Heritage Site.

Afan Alessandro Fantini
07/13/2016

The surrender of seasons

The surrender of seasons by AFANTINI on DeviantArt

 AFAN Alessandro Fantini
The surrender of seasons (2016)
Oil on canvas, 50x35 cm.

The Lust of Meiosis (Das innere Ausland)

The lust of Meiosis by AFANTINI on DeviantArt
The lust of Meiosis (Das Innere Ausland) (2016)
Oil on canvas, 25x35 cm.

"New York, a venture" on Indiehometv

It's time to celebrate since finally, after 20 months since the end of its post-production, the movie is available to watch on the new Indiehome TV.
All you have to do is register and enjoy the journey into a Manhattan you've never experienced before.
https://indiehometv.festhome.com/view_film/49935

NEW YORK, A VENTURE
Colors are flaming memories
A random incident that makes Adam lose every natural and artificial connections to the surrounding world, will be nothing but the first stage of a self-discovery through the darkness of memory. Only the verses of Amy, the enigmatic poetess of Central Park, will eventually enlighten the path of his quest with the Flames of a Vision that once split two lives, and now is about to reunite them in the cleansing whiteness of a stocking cap.

Directed, written and edited by Alessandro Fantini
Cinematography and special effects by Alessandro Fantini
Music by Alessandro Fantini

Cast:
Adam Clairfield: Craig Williams
Amy Bolnes: Kyrie Elieson
The lady of Central Park: Karen Goldfarb
The lunatic of Central Park: Henrik Kim Rehr
The first runner: Vincenzo Fantasia
The second runner: Said Raissi
Kevin Alcott: AFan Alessandro Fantini
Camera assistant at the Central Park Zoo: Lincoln Athas
Dialogue consultant: Craig Williams

Produced by AFAN PICTURES
Filmed in New Jersey and New York City from June to July 2014.

The leakage of Hierograms

The leakage of Hierograms by AFANTINI on DeviantArt

Shakespeare's death anniversary

I've always been fascinated by the character of Macbeth since the first time I read and watched the Shakespeare's play in my adolescence. Therefore I thought the best way to celebrate the Shakespeare's 400th death anniversary was playing my favourite lines from the fifth act.

Directed and edited by Alessandro Fantini.
Music by Alessandro Fantini.

AFAN&ARIANA - Gartenmares

  

Gartenmares (from the new AFAN Alessandro Fantini's album "Antalgica")

 Composed, performed and mixed by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.

 Vocals by Ariana aka Anna Vihonen and AFAN Alessandro Fantini. 

Lyrics by Alessandro Fantini and Anna Vihonen. 

Artwork by AFAN Alessandro Fantini. 

 https://afanalessandrofantini.bandcamp.com/album/antalgica

The Heart of Noise part 2

Last September I've drawn a pencil portrait of Jean-Michel Jarre placed on the motherboard of a synthesizer powered by an electric heart,four months before the title of the second volume of "Electronica" project was revealed.
This sort of poetic precognition convinced me that the portrait absolutely needed to be complemented by a visual story following the pace and mood of the eponymous track "The Heart of Noise part 2", involving a tribute to Luigi Russolo's "intonarumori" and some subtle hints to the Jarre's musical realm.
I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed being inspired by this new track merging old and new Jarre's sound.

Jean Michel Jarre - "The Heart of Noise part 2"

Video conceived, directed and edited by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
Animations and drawings by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
"The Heart of Noise part 2" composed and produced by Jean Michel Jarre
(from the upcoming album "Electronica 2: THe Heart of Noise").
Columbia records (2016)
 All rights reserved.
Video by AFAN Alessandro Fantini (2016).

AFANDRESS - UNDRESS YOUR VIBES

Secreted by the multimedianic realm of the multifaceted artist AFAN Alessandro Fantini (painter, filmmaker, writer, composer), the AFANdress brand offers a daring interpretation of fashion and gadgetry useful for undressing your most unfathomable moods.


 https://liveheroes.com/en/brand/afandress

AFAN&ARIANA - Blazing frost

AFAN&ARIANA Blazing frost (2016) 

Composed, performed and mixed by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.
Vocals by ARIANA (aka Anna Vihonen)
https://soundcloud.com/arianafinland
 Artwork by Alessandro Fantini.
From the upcoming Alessandro Fantini's album "Antalgica".
All rights reserved.

AFANSOUND 2016

MALORDA: from disorder to chaos

Alessandro Fantini
Malorda: From disorder to chaos (the series)

 
Alessandro Fantini plays the role of Dr. Famedio Malorda, a sulphureous aesthete halfway between Beau Brummel and a Ludwig II on acid, protagonist of a new gothic-grotesque web-serial where all the attempts to escape from a system without rules and certainties, are destined to clash with the salvific as well as ruthless chaos legislation.

 Amidst the chaos of rampant precariousness that makes increasingly tough approaching the godfathers disputed by hordes of lackeys, or the influential guy to rely on to get jobs and favors, the Studio Malorda aims to offer a free, quick and selfless service for solving the most common employment and social problems: achievement of employment contracts, occupied apartments assignment, reintegration into regular jobs or elimination of wait times for ct scan, clinical analysis and surgery.
If the current disorder makes you oppressed by the horde, you just need the healthy chaos of Malorda.
You can make reservations by calling after midnight (please destroy the cell after calling).
MALORDA: from disorder to chaos
Conceived, directed, written, performed, edited and produced b y Alessandro Fantini.
Music by Alessandro Fantini.

Philautia (2016)

Philautia by AFANTINI on DeviantArt

 Philautia (2016)
Your floating self is more "mine" than yours.

Oil on canvas 50x60 cm.

Blackstardust

AFAN Alessandro Fantini - Blackstardust (tribute to David Bowie), pencil on cardboard, 2015

Modify Watches interview

 Check out your watches as it's time to read the first interview of 2016 I've given to Modify Watches:

Defining himself as a "multimedianic artist", Alessandro Fantini is a self taught artist focusing on creating art through video, music, painting, photo, drawing and writing. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, his work never disappoints. Read on to find out more about Fantini's artistic journey.

Where do you find your inspiration?

The majority of my artworks could lead to think that I'm constantly transferring on paper and canvas my hallucinations and dreams, even though the latter represent only the 10% of my source of inspiration (and it mostly depends by the intensity of my night mental activity, that's a faculty I cannot control).
Actually I use to develop my visual ideas by following the unspeakable vibes perceived before a landscape (especially when I'm contemplating it from inside a car), listening to music, reading a book, or while walking alone in the countryside at the twilight musing about the events and the emotions I've experienced over the day. Somehow the final composition is the last stage of a long refining process triggered by a sudden perturbation of my sensorial dimension, something very close to the phenomenon of the "presque vu", “almost seen”, when we feel that we’re about to recall a name, a word or a particular, haunting feeling, without being able to tell it. The artworks are the nonverbal answers to those enigmatic perceptions.
Read on: http://modifywatches.com/blogs/latest/80844161-alessandro-fantini-interview