Area
Entry updated 29 April 2024. Tagged: Music.
Italian prog-rock band formed in 1972, who mastered a near-chaotic jazz-rock fusion style that many find musically sophisticated, although it may baffle others. Their work is characterized by a Marxist-Leninist perspective on the failures of western capitalism that was uncompromising, and sometimes incomprehensible – the original vocalist Demetrios Stratos (1945-1979) sang in Italian, in Arabic, in his native Greek and sometimes in a spontaneous gibberish of yawps and growls. Arbeit Macht Frei (1973) and Crac! (1975) mostly explore a polemical anti-fascist line, although the instrumental track "Megalopoli" on the latter album hints at science-fictional soundscapes. More obviously genre is Caution Radiation Area (1974), a very noisy and even unpleasantly cacophonous album that seems to dramatize a nuclear apocalypse (see Holocaust) that is foreshadowed by a "pink Comet". Chernobyl 7991 (1996) continues the apocalyptic theme. The band name is sometimes rendered as AreA. [AR/DRL]
see also: SF Music.
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