Siamo, Il volo di Icaro

Here we have two light-prog italian albums, late 70s. The first, Il Volo di Icaro, features quite good songwriting. It's worth briefly repeating the ancient Greek story of Icarus although I have a feeling everyone knows it well. Daedalus was an artisan who had been imprisoned on Crete by Minos, with his son, in order to escape he created wings made of feathers and glued with wax. He warned his son repeatedly not to attempt to fly too high but the son became intoxicated with the feeling and the sun melted his wings and he fell into the sea (a specific sea near Samos). Daedalus must have cried hard, it's difficult to lose a son, even in this way. It would've been heartbreaking to have known he could have avoided it with more care, and that it was a fully preventable accident. It generally takes months to years to get over a death like that. Constantly he would have been afraid to fly again, to even look at a bird would have been painful. He surely would have been able to commiserate with prometheus bound.

How close did Icarus have to get? Well since the temperature will drop inversely proportionally to the square of the radius from the sun, starting from a surface t for the sun of 6000 C, to the earth's minus 15 without greenhouse effect 93 million miles away, in order to reach a temperature of 40 degrees or so to melt wax while still being compatible with life would have meant getting about halfway to the sun.

This record doesn't get into the astronomical details, but has some beautiful tracks outlining the tale, some straight pop songwriting, some sweet folk guitar (Giorno di Marzo) some ingenious passages. The last song unfortunately is a throwaway song of street sounds. The second last Meditation is a very atmospheric piano piece in D minor. Check out the beautiful synths that then play out a spacey melody over a nice bass groove.

Meditation...