Die with me

I remember as if it were yesterday when, during a school trip in the mid-90s, I listened to a friend’s mixtape and how I was dazzled by especially one of the songs. After a few days I asked him what it was, but he had already erased the tape cassette and he couldn’t recall the selection he had made! It took me almost a year to find out I had listened to Black No. 1, the best-selling single by Type O Negative from their 1993 album Bloody Kisses. Since then, my passion for the band, with its melancholy, its humor that sometimes develops into self-devaluation, its extreme and hopeless romanticism, and above all with Peter’s magnificent voice, has stayed with me.

Type O Negative had a great influence on Paolo’s music: their theatricality, their love for sudden conclusions or changes or even their “musical jokes”, some chord progressions and melodic contours, became part of who he is today. In the score of the piece Paolo plays with October Rust’s credits, when he writes «de-composed and re-composed», suggesting that it’s not a cover in a traditional way but a true reworking of the original song. The Florentine composer and pianist makes the piece his own, modifying the structure, changing the sections’ functions, reinterpreting the themes, deleting and adding musical elements, but in doing so, he reveals how much he absorbed some characteristics of Type O Negative’s language and shows, in this tribute to Peter Steele’s memory, his deepest gratitude to the band.