LP reissue in triple gatefold sleeve as the original album, with sound taken the master tapes. Some records survive because someone searched long enough for them. The debut album by Alphataurus is one of those: recorded in Milan in 1973 on Magma Records, a label just founded by Vittorio De Scalzi of New Trolls and his brother Aldo, it passed almost unnoticed on release, in a pressing the collectors' market now values between three and three and a half thousand euros for an intact original copy. Triple gatefold artwork by Adriano Marangoni: a dove of peace dropping bombs from its open belly over a city in flames, Vesuvius erupting in the background. This was not decorative. It was 1973, and Italy was living with the consequences of what had been set in motion between 1968 and the hot autumn of 1969. This reissue restores that visual and sonic gesture to the dignity of a document.
The Milanese quintet built five compositions of considerable dramatic tension, all over eight minutes except two shorter pieces that serve as structural counterweight. The album's radicality is neither ideological like Area's nor ethnomusicological like Aktuala's: it is a radicality of formal conception, the challenge of a group of very young and virtually unknown musicians who chose density over accessibility. Peccato d'Orgoglio opens with Michele Bavaro's voice, carrying something unmistakably southern that refuses to dissolve into the Milanese scene, a vocality with real specific gravity. The territory is immediately clear: alternation between passages of soft instrumental polyphony and sudden eruptions of the riff, a dialogue between the Italian chamber tradition and the harder rock that was metabolising the legacy of Uriah Heep and Deep Purple without forgetting Emerson. Pietro Pellegrini knows Keith Emerson, certainly, but transforms him into something more architectural, where the Hammond serves the composition rather than the performance.
The peak is La Mente Vola: a sharp, almost cosmic Moog introduction gives way to a vibraphone solo of rare refinement, one of those moments where the Milan scene remembers Bruno Maderna and contemporary chamber music more than it cares to admit. It is here that Alphataurus distinguish themselves from their closest contemporaries, Il Balletto di Bronzo and Museo Rosenbach, with whom they share the heavier end of the RPI spectrum. Where the Balletto chose lysergic darkness and proto-metal as their language, Alphataurus pursue a more synthetic conception, moving between registers without losing coherence. Those who know Magma or Henry Cow will find something different but recognisable: the tension between controlled form and expressive impulse that defines the best European music of that period, in an Italian idiom that is neither folkloristic nor exotic.
The original 1973 copy is essentially unfindable. The reissue history charts a slow rediscovery: the Japanese King CD in the eighties, then Si-Wan's Korean triple gatefold pressing, then BTF's 1995 remaster supervised by Pellegrini himself, who kept the master alive through the years in which the rest of the band had scattered. Recent pressings on 180-gram vinyl with the restored trifold gatefold complete the arc. With 2024 bringing the death of Michele Bavaro, last of the founders to go after Alfonso Oliva and Guido Wasserman, the record stops being merely an artefact and becomes an act of memory. The right moment to find it is now.
