Massimo Volume: Time running along the edges
Or, Emidio Clementi and Emanuel Carnevali’s unending search for perfection.

There’s strength in the rain that soaks the edge of the sink
And my stretched-out arms, today.
It’s not in the hills nor in the sky that lowers the flight of the birds
And has the faded colours of a Polaroid.
Emanuel Carnevali, you who starved to death in American kitchens,
Who were tired and exhausted in American dining rooms:
You used to write.
And there’s strength in your words.- Massimo Volume, Il primo dio (from Lungo i bordi, 1995)
Sometimes things just fall into place before our very eyes, and for a moment we feel like we’re part of some kind of universal masterplan. A fine example are those moments when you randomly meet a long-lost acquaintance and pass a whole afternoon talking and laughing, and you feel like a cog in the great machinery of chance. Emidio Clementi (second from the left in the picture above), singer of the band Massimo Volume (“Maximum Volume”), basically spent his whole lifetime searching for such a moment. He eventually found it thanks to a collection of poems by Emanuel Carnevali, an Italian immigrant who fled his country in 1914, at age 16, to live and work in the United States. Carnevali died, sick and poor, only 28 years later. But what do a 20th century bassist and frontman for one of Italy’s best alternative rock bands and a long-forgotten failed poet have in common?
Clementi is an hermetic writer, and shares his output between his band and his work as an author and poet. The main driving force behind his art is his own life, which he recounts in detail in his book L’ultimo dio (“The last God”, 2004). Born in Ascoli Piceno (a middle-sized town in the central/southern region of Marche) in 1967, Clementi spent his childhood years torn between a family which was bursting out at the seams and a general sense of malaise caused by his sensibility. His words are heartbreaking: he recounts how everything started to fall apart with his father losing his job, and tells the reader about his fear to even try and change the situation his family found himself in. He never appears in dialogue in the book, almost a side-character whose voice is drowned by his mother’s desperate chitchat — which fills the first part of the book with a strong dialectal inflexion, something even Italians would find pretty hard to grasp at a first read.
The book goes on to tell about his family’s moving to the nearby seaside town of San Benedetto del Tronto and his adoption of the punk aesthetic and lifestyle, climaxing in his decision to leave home after seeing his mother plead his brother to ask their grandmother for money. In a way, he gives up — abandoning his family to try and make it on his own in Sweden, where he lives on the street until he meets a local girl whom he falls in love with. He works as a newspaper deliveryman, cycling through the chilling Swedish morning while worrying about his status as an illegal immigrant. Their love eventually dissolves for no reason at all other than the passing of time. Clementi then moves to London, where he has a fleeting romance with a girl he knew from high school in whose room he is staying at — unbeknownst to the houseowners. He passes his days aimlessly walking through the city and has a penchant for Highgate, where he tries to befriends pensioners walking their dogs to no avail.
It’s 1991. With no money left and no prospects whatsoever, Clementi decides to return home — but moves to the culturally-thriving Bologna soon after, where he starts Massimo Volume with drummer Vittoria Burattini and guitarists Gabriele Ceci and Egle Sommacal. He has never sung before, nor does he know how to properly do it, but lets the other bandmembers read his lyrics- Vittoria being the one that puts a microphone in front of him and just asks him to sing. Clementi has always written, but the one thing that convinces him think that his stuff is worth reading is a collection of Emanuel Carnevali’s poetry given to him by a friend soon after he moved to Bologna. Carnevali’s life is short and bitter: he boards a ferry to New York and starts working as a waiter while learning English by walking through the city and reading billboards, all the while writing poems in both Italian and English and trying to make it as a writer, or journalist, or proofreader — anything that involves the written word. After several failures he eventually befriends William Carlos Williams and gets praise from literary behemoths such as Ezra Pound, but succumbs to encephalitis lethargica, a sleeping sickness, just six months after moving to Chicago. He had just started to work as an associate editor of Poetry magazine, after being invited by Harriet Monroe. Carnevali only manages to publish one book during his lifetime, A Hurried Man (1925). He dies, hospitalized back in Italy, after choking on a small chunk of bread. Nobody notices him gasping for air.
Above half-eaten courses, crumpled napkins,
Above lipstick-stained cigarette stubs,
Above ashtrays filled to the brim -
You knew you’d find the hurricane there.
Saying something while being kidnapped by the hurricane:
Here’s the only fact that might compensate me
For not being the hurricane myself.- Massimo Volume, Il primo dio (from Lungo i bordi, 1995)
Il primo dio (“The first God”) is the first song from Massimo Volume’s second album, Lungo i bordi (“Along the edges”, 1995), and is arguably their best and most-known piece of music. It’s Clementi’s homage to Carnevali, almost a declaration of kinship between the two. The music is equally fragile, almost on the brim of collapsing: Egle Sommacal’s finger-picked chords accompany Clementi’s strained vocals, only rising in tone when the song reaches its end. Burattini’s drumming is clear-cut and steady, refusing to highlight the small emotional outbursts Clementi has while singing. Clementi sees his wanderings through Europe as similar to what Carnevali did when moving to America, and feels the same detachment from life he used to describe in his poems. They are both strangers in strange lands, they both do not “feel enough”. Dullness embraces everything. Carnevali’s piece Almost a God begins, “I am dying under this heat / but there may be worse / I love my wife / but I should love her more / I love my sweetheart but her love should be more universal / One word describes her but I do not know which word”. Nothing happens. He waits for something — God knows what — but he does not know when and if it is coming.
Clementi’s lyrics share the same feeling, and Lungo i bordi is probably Massimo Volume at their best. “It’s me and you, leaning on these chairs / Me and you on these chairs / Waiting / Then, dust begins”, Clementi sings on Il tempo scorre lungo i bordi (“Time runs along the edges”). “We tried to make it and thought we could do it / And walked towards mute sunsets / And we felt shame just by looking at them / And we forgot our inadequate bodies / Lost, we laughed” he recites in Ravenna, the closing track on the album — nothing at all happening, the failure of something being the only certainty. The band focuses on trivial things, getting to the heart of everyday life through a wise narrative lens. Even buying takeout pizza becomes the subject of a song: Pizza Express pictures Clementi waiting for his food to be handled to him. A general sense of uneasiness hovers around the room, with the owner of the place repeating, “He just passed the window again — Did you see him?” But no one comes. Clementi feels watched and becomes paranoid. He just pays for his pizza, gets a couple cans of soda from a vending machine and leaves, stating, “They were the last instants of what I’d call, from then on, my previous life”. That’s it.
Emanuel,
First God.
Rimbaud,
Prayer to things more beautiful than me.
Rimbaud,
Advent of youth.
Perfect picture.
Perfect feeling.
Today, your scream lies in the rain.- Massimo Volume, Il primo dio (from Lungo i bordi, 1995)
But it’s in Il primo Dio that Clementi feels at once powerful and weary, the only instance where the possibility of something happening cracks through the sky and takes the form of a hurricane, sweeping bodies away — including his own. His only regret, he says, is “not being the hurricane himself”. The only thing that can “compensate” him for this is “saying something”: words become the only way to salvation, the only way to leave a mark on the surface of this world. The song ends with an explicit reference to Carnevali, his name cried out and put beside one of the greatest poets ever, the French Arthur Rimbaud, in a last, desperate attempt to finally give Carnevali the glory he deserved but never got. We are ugly and undeserving, but we can still pray to things that are above us in order to try and paint a “perfect picture”, to try and feel a “perfect feeling”.
Massimo Volume is still active and their discography is ripe with wonderful songs. But Il primo Dio will probably always be the best starting point for a new listener. You can find its official video below. Click here for an English translation of the lyrics.