Everything’s on fire on the artistic path of Francesca Morello, aka R.Y.F.. Out today October 7th, 2022 on vinyl and digital via Bronson Recordings, Tutto Brucia (Music From The Motus Show) is the original soundtrack composed by R.Y.F. for the homonymous new theatrical show by the acclaimed Motus theater company by Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande (MDLSX, Panorama, NELLA TEMPESTA), that sees her as protagonist on stage – on songs and live music – together with Silvia Calderoni and Stefania Tansini.
Morello says she created the music, based on the union between the electric guitar and a more and more free and powerful voice, starting from improvisation, that means following her usual instinct: “All the tracks were born during the natural work in progress with Silvia, Stefania and Demetrio Cecchitelli, who composed the soundscapes. Once tuned to the atmosphere of the scene, I started working on the text with the help of the words suggested by Ilenia Caleo, curator of the dramaturgical research, and by the same Motus, who granted me however total freedom of writing. The process was harmonious, because the music and the respective scenes are very closely connected“. This is why it was decided to record live Tutto Brucia (Music From The Motus Show), during a show at the Triennale, in Milan, in November 2021, in order to represent the fundamental interaction between music and text. Recording, editing and mixing were completed by Andrea Cola, who carried out a remarkable production work, masterfully depicting the depth of the theatrical spaces. Finally, the master was entrusted to Giovanni Versari. “Although the tracks can be appreciated on their own“, Morello continues, “it would be nice if those who listen to the record could also attend the show, which is never the same as itself but depends every time on our energies and feelings. I follow every second what is happening on stage, insinuating myself between the sentences and actions of Silvia and Stefania, in a continuous giving and receiving space“. So, the voices of Calderoni and Tansini intertwine with the music and become the imaginative link to relive the passages of the show.
The music of Tutto Brucia, greeted with important response from audience and critics, was composed by Morello at the same time as the songs included on her solo album Everything Burns, released in 2021, always by Bronson Recordings, and named after the English translation of the play by Motus, Tutto Brucia (“Everything Burns”). Everything Burns could be defined as an electro-punk explosion steeped in queer, feminist subversion, able to conquer even the Skunk Anansie who chose R.Y.F. to open their summer gigs in Italy. “Sometimes I would really like to burn a lot of things”, Morello says, “bad things that are in this world, this society. Patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, racism — burn all discriminations. I believe all discriminations start with the patriarchy, and I would like to burn them all down for the people to be happier — and freer”. The album contained also the dark dance single Cassandra, an epic hymn of sisterhood accompanied by a video directed by Motus with the participation of Calderoni and Tansini, and the ballad Pocket Full Of Ashes, both originally written for Tutto Brucia. “I think that women need to raise their heads, as Cassandra says in the tragedy, and be proud of themselves. It’s time to take the powers back”.
The extended Pocket Full Of Ashes (Tutto Brucia Ed.), available as first single from the soundtrack, is a cathartic hypnosis revolving around the haunting guitar line and the evocative vocals of the refrain: «I’ve pocket full of ashes / Pocket full of tears / I’ve pocket full of ashes / Pocket full of fear». The song in its version for the show, a rewriting of Euripides’ Trojan Women, is about the last day of happiness experienced by the Trojans, before the destructive attack by the Greeks. Morello remembers: “The refrain was born during a workshop with Motus and Silvia Calderoni. I had launched the field recording of a flowing river as a background sound and improvised a loop. Silvia literally started filling her shorts pockets with stage ash and I started to sing… The text is a sad and melancholy lament, a hug to what is gone, lost, and you would still like to hold and caress“. In the tracklist of the soundtrack we can find also Cassandra (Tutto Brucia Ed.), in addition to other songs of great impact, from the intensity of the second single Elena’s Beauty Theme – a sweet and minimal ballad that follows the waves of the sea, where beauty becomes shame and the cause of a war, but the fault is always only of those who use brute force: this is the voice of women without a land – to the industrial-gospel of It’s Not Fair To Die.
Quoting the official presentation of the show by Motus: I mourn for the sons who died in war / For the women made slaves / For the lost freedom / Oh beloved creatures, come back, come, come and take us away! Silvia/Hecuba whispers these words interwoven with the music and lyrics by R.Y.F. (Francesca Morello), Stefania rips the air with a heavy knife and a peasant sickle, as in the southern European collective rites of condolence that have disappeared. Perhaps this image is enough to enter Tutto Brucia – through the words of J. P. Sartre, Judith Butler, Ernesto De Martino, Edoardo Viveiros de Castro, NoViolet Bulawayo, Donna Haraway. The lament spreads through that black Mediterranean which – then as now – is the scene of conquests of colonial Europe, of migrations and diasporas. Among the ruins of an empty and distorted space, covered by ashes and corpses of sea monsters, where everything has already happened, the question of radical vulnerability emerges. The broken body of Hecuba, the prophetic word of Cassandra, who sees beyond the end, the spectral cry of Polyxena, the invocation to the dead of Andromache, the violence suffered by Helen and finally the most fragile and helpless body, that of the child, Astianatte – give voice to the most exposed and vulnerable subjects. And to the spectres that besiege them/us. Never more than now does mourning appear to us as a political issue. Which lives matter? What makes a life grief-worthy? It is through pain that the protagonists in the tragic scene are materially transformed – they become other than themselves: bitch, stone or running water, processing the violence suffered. A metamorphosis that opens to other possible forms. And writes the world to come. For the end of the world is but the end of a world.
