Extraliscio: “That time we brought the smooth to Sanremo”

At the last Sanremo festival they brought their “dance punk” on stage and in the homes of Italians. In their first book, EXTRALISCIO – A punk story on the edge of the dance hall (The ship of Theseus) collect three autobiographies which have the contours of an adventure novel and together make up a true story: the experimenter and multi-instrumentalist Mirco Mariani, accompanied by the smooth star Moreno Il Biondo and the voice of My Romagna in the world Mauro Ferrara.

Extraliscio with Elisabetta Sgarbi and her Betty Wrong Edizioni Musicali have launched the smooth in the future: a strange encounter with noise, electronic, rock and pop guitars, in an explosion of sounds, irony, joy and freedom. Inside the book there is a special bookmark with a code to access Nexo + and all its contents for free for a month, discovering Extraliscio – Dance Punk. We will dance until the light of dawn enters and the little film The ship on the mountain, both by Elisabetta Sgarbi. Below is an extract from the book, in which Marco Miriani tells the decision

Below is an extract from the book, in which Marco Miriani talks about the decision to participate in the Sanremo festival last March.

MIRCO MARIANI

And then, in March 2021, Sanremo arrived. I honestly do not feel popular, to be honest I had never dreamed of going to the Festival. The relative popularity of Extraliscio excites and flatters me, yes, but it scares me and I don’t want to get caught up in everyone else’s patterns, become an aspiring 50-year-old pop star. So, one of Elisabetta Sgarbi’s brilliant ideas was to decide to bring a song so little from Sanremo to Sanremo. White light black, already from the title is a piece … sinister. But Elizabeth doesn’t do anything by chance. White black light it is certainly not the best song I have written, but she has never lost sight of the cultural component of our mission. We have our backs full of history, our feet sunk in a territory, and we dance around Italy like kids. The words of the song, rare yet so immediate, are from the great Pacific, which at times seems to know me better than… me. The mix is ​​by Pino Pischetola, aka Pinaxa, who has always curated the sound of Franco Battiato. The recording is thanks to my sound engineer Cotone, Emanuele Para, who together with Pinaxa worked on the entire album It’s good to get lost. A ruffian song would perhaps have been more broadcast on the radio but it would have distorted us, it could have represented the end of our sincerity, the end of Extraliscio. The smooth made millions of people fall in love with kissing and dancing. This regional music deserved fifteen minutes of glory on the stage of Italian music par excellence. The nice thing is that she went up on that stage with real super stars: Fiorenzo Tassinari on sax, Moreno il Biondo on clarinet, Mauro Ferrara on vocal cords. And with that other unclassifiable and masked creature by Davide Toffolo. In my opinion, Amadeus, who chose us, made a gift to music of all. Yet I was worried. Mauro, Moreno and Fiorenzo are pure as babies. They have been in the womb of the smooth all their life. Making them play a different note is like hearing your child calling you dad for the first time. In Sanremo I had listened to rumors, then denied, according to which the journalists wanted to crush us. I felt responsible for my orchestra, as if I had thrown my son into a piranha tank. But when you are dancing you have to dance. So, at that Sanremo, the German musician Peter Pichler brought with us for the first time in Italy a bizarre instrument like the Trautonium: dissonant, howling, mysterious. And Peter did not make his debut in our country on a stage of contemporary, niche music, but on the stage of Italian popular music par excellence, the Ariston, together with an orchestra from Romagna. Having said that, now I think that if our participation has aroused even a few people the curiosity to understand what the smooth is, then we have won something more valuable than our third place in the orchestra vote.

copyright (c) The ship of Theseus