Outopsya began life in Trento in 2003 on the initiative of Luca Vianini and Evan Mazzucchi and other musicians helped them along the years. The name of the band is an acronym for OUT Of PSYchical Activity and the aim of the musicians involved in this project is to blend jazz, classical music, metal and progressive rock with electronic sounds.
After a debut album titled “Sum” (Videoradio, 2009), in 2011 they released a double album on the independent label Lizard Records, “Fake”, a complex work that was conceived as a soundtrack for an old American silent horror film directed in 1925 by Rupert Julian, The Phantom of the Opera, based on a famous novel by Gaston Leroux and starring, among others, Lon Chaney. On account of copyright issues, the band couldn’t release the album with a packaging featuring a DVD with the film to combine music and images, so the they turned it into something different, adding some vocal parts with English lyrics to make it more acceptable as an autonomous work.
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| Outopsya |
After a debut album titled “Sum” (Videoradio, 2009), in 2011 they released a double album on the independent label Lizard Records, “Fake”, a complex work that was conceived as a soundtrack for an old American silent horror film directed in 1925 by Rupert Julian, The Phantom of the Opera, based on a famous novel by Gaston Leroux and starring, among others, Lon Chaney. On account of copyright issues, the band couldn’t release the album with a packaging featuring a DVD with the film to combine music and images, so the they turned it into something different, adding some vocal parts with English lyrics to make it more acceptable as an autonomous work.
Outopsya’s current line up features only Luca Vianini (guitars, vocals, synthesizers, drums) who wrote the music and lyrics and Evan Mazzucchi (bass, cello) who took charge of the art-work and design: the only “guest musician” here is a computer. According to an interview with the duo, they chose the title “Fake” to underline the dichotomy between what is false and what is true in the real life. The falsity here is evoked by the electronic sounds of the computers and contrasts with the sounds of the real instruments. The album was conceived as a single long track of more than 90 minutes but to be released on CD it had to be split in two parts. The two parts are characterized by two different colours, violet for the CD1, the most challenging, experimental one and black for CD2 featuring more accessible passages.
To be honest, I have to say that without the images some passages lose their evocative strength and risk to seem redundant, boring and to dilute the many brilliant ideas that you can find in this work. Moreover there are no liner notes and the booklet doesn’t contain the lyrics (that are almost incomprehensible since the vocal parts are frequently filtered through sound effects und used as an instrument). What to do then? Well, I’ve found the film on Youtube and I watched it with the music of this album in the background. In this way even the most experimental parts make sense. It did work and I enjoyed both the film and the music!
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