28 – Who is Antelope Cobbler?

Marco Cesarini was born in 1984 and privately studied electric bass and guitar. During his teenage years, he formed several bands playing original music: Nolo Uma, jazz-rock Band, Brambate. He then formed Windom Earle and graduated from the Academy of Modern Music (AMM) studying electric bass, arrangement, and jazz composition with Lorenzo De Angeli, Marco Pacassoni, and Enzo Bocciero. Together with Davide Mazzoli, he formed Telios De Lorca, an electroacoustic music duo, collaborating with the painter Giuliano Del Sorbo for a Live Painting show, “Paintheatre.” In 2021, during the Covid19 quarantine period, he founded the Uqbar Orchestra formation, with which he realized the project titled Transumanza followed, in 2023, by Trasumanza vol II – Vulnus.

In addition to his work with bands, in recent years he has collaborated on soundtracks for three documentaries and a short film by the director and videomaker Filippo Biagianti, “Noi Partigiani-Storie di resistenza,” “Dalla semina al cielo,” “Selenik-Le tre stagioni di Salonicco,” and the short film “Sa ‘ilgiadora de su tempus.” In 2023, he composed and curated the audio for a podcast commissioned by “Doctors for Human Rights” produced by the Nouvelle Plague theater company on migrants traveling the Balkan route to arrive in Val di Susa and then pass the French border. The “Marco Cesarini & Henry Mclusky” project arises from the need to address other themes, responding to a precise narrative method, which is the basis of his artistic writing

Chi è Antelope Cobbler

Now that the long shadow
embraces things
the sky itself
all evening and at the table with me,
sorting out the moon in the margin
the idyll looms
few words indeed yield
all evening is only inside me.

Ivano Ferrari

1 – The Heart of Henry Mclusky

One winter evening, I was walking the streets of the historic center of a deserted city, looking for a woman known in the area as “The Muse”; they had told me to ask her who “Antelope Cobbler” was. This name had haunted me for some time now; I had dreamt it, not once but countless times, it was an obsession. I knew it might seem crazy, but something inside me, something I had never felt before, urged me to press on. Just a few days earlier, I had started asking around; many knew but preferred not to speak. After several attempts, someone had let slip the name of The Muse and where to find her. The fact that so many were reluctant to talk to me about Antelope Cobbler made everything more interesting, given my nature and profession. My name is Henry Mclusky, and I am a private investigator.
The information I had was that The Muse could be found in the alleys, an area of the city that never sleeps, always active. I had passed the noisiest stretch, and as I walked down a dark street, I noticed it getting narrower, the voices of people echoing in the distance. I thought that cities are like the psyche, the glittering center all sequins is the conscious, the alleys are the subconscious, teeming ceaselessly like our desires, but the street I was on was beyond the alleys, so? Was I surpassing the unconscious? What else is there? On the right, I saw steep stairs, at the bottom, a dim light could be seen coming from a room. I descended as if gently pushed from behind, as if my body no longer belonged to me, I followed the flow and let myself go. As soon as I crossed the threshold, the light that seemed low from afar became increasingly blinding… ever more blinding…
I heard a female voice coming from beyond the blinding source, and it was strange because I felt like I was floating, not in control of my body anymore, then suddenly… darkness!

> Download PDF score

I decided to exchange the world I lived in: my office day, the late nights with friends over a mug of beer, the countryside outings, and the woman. Why? to experience renouncing these things, these flavors, shutting myself in a morally dirty, psychologically torn chasm in order to bring to the surface the water of a well contaminated by time and poisoned by ignorance.

Raffaele Stammelluti

2 – Funeral March for an Outcast

“Remember the forgotten, write for them, for the outcasts. Each of us is a potential outcast; everyone can be discriminated against and rejected, never forget it when you compose.”
Days after being in that room, the only clear memories I had were these words. But what had happened? Who had pushed me? What did The Muse look like? But above all, how did I get out of there? What does Antelope Cobbler have to do with all this? It seemed pointless to seek answers; the only thing I remembered were the words of the woman, I just couldn’t get them out of my head, like a mantra.
Then some images from a remote past began to surface. In my wanderings, years before, I met Rocco, or rather “Rocco the Philosopher,” as they called him.
Now he’s gone, he left one winter Sunday on a bench in a park on the outskirts of the city. We weren’t friends, but we had shared some moments together; his story always struck me because it could be the story of many of us, we can all “break” along the way. He had a degree in philosophy, he had even started teaching, then he became spiritually ill, today it’s called schizophrenia.
His life changed from that moment on, he became increasingly lonely, and despite coming from a bourgeois family, he chose to live on the streets, although from what I knew he occasionally returned to his mother’s house. When I met him, he was already in bad shape; many glorious stories about him came to me from people who had known him before he became ill. I saw him cyclically in the city; he often needed money because with the illness came the vice of alcohol. Rocco was wonderful, tall, with blue eyes and long, wavy hair, a Greek profile, or rather, he resembled the sculptural representations of a Greek philosopher, a postmodern Socrates/Plato.
The outcasts are the rejected ones, those who do not receive assistance or consideration, it’s a precise term, the word itself, outcast, has its own musicality that allows us to “feel” the meaning, as well as understand it rationally.
There are many stories like his, like Rocco’s, and mental illness is still a great taboo of modern society.
Once these people would have been respected by more enlightened societies than ours, once those we call “deviants, psychotics, or mental collapses” inspired poet-militants, situationists, dreamers. Today they are incarcerated in hospitals or languish on sidewalks.
Perhaps The Muse wanted me to look for Cobbler among the outcasts? My search has led me here; all this must make sense… or not?

> Download PDF score

From the sack
things fell to the ground.
and I think
that the world
is just a smirk,
which faintly gleams
on the lips of a hanged man

Velimir Chlebnikov

3 – Did you think it would end differently?

They rang the intercom; when I picked up the receiver, a voice told me, “The Mysterious Man doesn’t want you to search for Antelope Cobbler,” when I went downstairs, I found no one, whoever it was had already left. I often met The Mysterious Man at the most interesting venue in the city; it was in the Jewish ghetto, one of the few areas that seemed to resist the rampant architectural homogenization; he was always with The Impostor, playing chess. I knew them well; I had been told they had a soft spot for me, that they liked me; they looked alike, the only difference being one was short and the other tall, they could be brothers as far as I knew. Their voices were sinuous, consolatory, they had a certain charm; when they spoke, they managed to be always synchronized, sometimes even in unison; there was never a pause too many in their conversations.
I went to Solomon, a place in the Jewish ghetto to talk to the Mysterious Man, as always I found them in a corner entangled at the chessboard.
The Mysterious Man:
– Don’t look for Antelope, it’s a waste of time, you just need to add some skills, now it’s required by the new scoring standards, you know they’ve been raised, right? Your cognitive biases demand it, things must continue this way, they’re fine as they are, why do you want to change them? There are no alternatives. This obsession with knowing Antelope Cobbler will only bring you problems, huge problems, trust me, we like you, you just need to conform.
The Imposter:
– The Man is right, take me for example! I’m a well-established Artist now, my face is always on billboards. You see… art is not a complex matter, in our country, you just need to find the right courtyard, you’re too ideological, embrace postmodern cynicism. Just flaunt awareness and self-irony. You see… you think too much about things, this obsession with knowing Antelope Cobbler for example… do you think it could be useful? It won’t, because everything is simpler than it seems…
The Mysterious Man:
– Repetitive content, delete the biases!
Meanwhile, a DJ of a certain age was starting his evening, he started with a song by the Beastie Boys then senselessly switched to Nick Drake, then poorly mixed a reggaeton song and at that point the Mysterious Man and the Imposter stood up and began to dance and sing rhythmically looking at me with a grim look:
DELETE THE BIASES… FIND YOUR SKILLS… DISCLAIMER… COGNITIVE BIASES… DELETE… NO ANTELOPE… NO COBBLER… INDIVIDUALISM… YO… BRO… POSTMODERN… THIS… WE… BELIEVE!

> Download PDF score

The difference between a Saint and a Magician
is this, that the Saint acts through
God and the Magician operates instead
through nature

Paracelsus

4 – Anomaly – Reflection on simple forms

While Henry Mclusky is cursing his soul to find Antelope Cobbler, a few kilometers away from his home something anomalous, or rather, preternatural is happening.
Imagine a lonely farmhouse in the winter countryside of some remote hill, in what could be a province of central Italy. As you visualize it, you notice that part of the house is on fire, a particular fire, eternal, confined only to some rooms, flames coming out of the windows. Strange, isn’t it? Why doesn’t the fire spread?
It is not known. Too many questions don’t help in these cases, let’s continue with the game of seduction. Now a slow and sinuous camera movement brings your view inside the main door, where there are no flames, it turns right and enters a large room, here too the fire is absent. A woman in the twilight bending over a table, tinkering with a gray dough, clattering on the slime while emitting cacophonous sounds moving back and forth, without stopping kneading. On the table are placed alembics of various sizes, inside them liquids of various colors gurgle, while she continues her ritual our subjective moves slowly and shows us two photos hanging behind her, in one the face of Henry Mclusky and in the other that of Rocco the Philosopher, only in Rocco’s there is a red cross above, in the background meanwhile the alternation of the cacophonous litany, the clattering and the kneading continue, but faster and faster, faster and faster… then… Stop! Silence. The subjective goes back and shows us the woman’s hands caressing what could look like a miniature clay puppet, she lifts it, looks at it and repeats some incomprehensible phrases, turns the table and buries it in a hole under a pile of dry leaves, with a shovel she takes some burning embers and pours them on the leaves, repeats this movement two, three, four times. The sound of an electrical disturbance begins to spread in the room, the woman is standing in front of the hole and observes. Now you too can see through the eyes of the woman, maybe you have become her. From the leaves emerge anatomical parts, a leg, then an arm, the limbs begin to move in jerks, the woman bends down and with her hands moves the residues of burnt foliage to see what she has created. Now it is completely visible, that clay puppet has become a man. The subjective shows us two figures in the twilight illuminated by the flames, stop!

> Download PDF score

Every night every morning
some are born to ruin
every morning every night
some are born to sweet delight
some are born to endless night

William Blake

5 – Stray Dogs

In post-industrial outskirts, you see roofs of abandoned warehouses after the 2008 crisis towering into the sky and merging with what remains of a countryside full of memories and stories that no one will ever know, seen from above they look like sand dunes of an alien planet, immense parking lots and truck trailers scattered like skeletons of a distant past, we wander in the peripheral areas like stray dogs, sniffing the ether around us hoping to smell home. The architectures assault us with their violence, the edges command us to retreat. These symmetrical agglomerations, which only host human presence during the day, surround a city different in architecture but identical in the flow of life, a historic center without a precise identity transformed over the years to ensure that people stay well hidden elsewhere during the evening hours.
The perpetual crisis of a country, of a provincial city, the smell of the psychosphere acts on our neural systems, we all know but pretend not to. “ES must survive,” I repeated to myself.
I have always been fascinated by industrial areas at night, they are extremely aggressive during the day, but when everything is still, silent, when the industry’s ego is asleep, they have a melancholic charm. The working class rests.
It was night, I was driving without purpose, without music, only the sound of the engine of a car made in some factory in the assembly line of life that perpetuates without stopping. Why was I so obsessed with knowing who Antelope Cobbler was? I was confused, I only knew that name had been haunting me for a long time now, I had heard it mentioned several times by the Mysterious Man and the Imposter, they were private conversations, they didn’t know I was listening, I had only managed to grasp fragments of disconnected conversations, I sensed that their tone of voice was becoming serious and worried. The last time I saw them they clearly told me I shouldn’t look for Cobbler. Their prohibition had intrigued me even more, moreover, I sensed a deep connection with this affair. The fascination that those two individuals had aroused in me for years was turning into something else, a mixture of guilt and contempt, and it was gradually increasing during my tireless search for the Truth!
Go home, Henry, watch a South American soap opera, do something to stop thinking, such a raw reality bath can strike even the most stoic of investigators.

> Download PDF score

Joint diminishment with truth
Sublime work accomplished without blemish.
One can be preserved in doing so.
It is auspicious to undertake something.
How is this executed?
Let two bowls be used for the sacrifice.

I Ching

6 – Final Solution

I hadn’t yet managed to see his face, until that moment he had kept a proper distance, like a good bloodhound. But gradually his presence became more and more invasive, I had seen him lurking even inside the house. I knew that certain thoughts would induce him to show up, so I headed towards the bedroom sure that I would find him there. It was time to confront him. I opened the door, I wasn’t wrong, he was in the twilight in a corner of the room, the light coming from the bedside lamp, I ran towards him, in an instant my hands were around his neck, he tried to free himself, he tripped me, but I managed to maintain balance, it was a diversion, my attention shifted from my murderous grip to the center of gravity, with a sharp blow of the forearm he moved my hands from his neck and pushed me away, he withdrew into the dark corner of the room, in the excitement I hadn’t managed to look him in the face, I headed towards the wall switch to have stronger light, he started laughing, I stopped, a shiver ran down my spine, that laughter was familiar. Something told me that once the light was turned on I couldn’t go back. Silence. Look down. Hand on the switch. Light!
I turned around but couldn’t lift my gaze, I was stuck, after a few seconds of unreal immobility I gathered courage and raised my eyes. It’s not possible, what I had in front of me, it was me, or rather it was my identical copy, but there was something different. Yes, his eyes!
We stood still facing each other, he stopped laughing and assumed a mocking grimace. I asked him, “Who are you?” “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Henry Mclusky, I’m you, or rather I’m your Bad Conscience that has taken shape, that continuous rumination in your head. Do you know the sine wave?” “No!” I replied. He continued, “The sine wave has a zero point, a straight line, around it another line moves, it exceeds zero in height, but symmetrically that height also falls below zero, opposite polarities. I am all those peaks below zero, I am the incarnated emanation of those peaks, I am the Less. To give us shape, the Alien must come and take us in a dark, hostile territory to human presence, the world of things that should not be created, someone also calls us “Uncreated”. But he can’t do it often, he suffers too much, risks his own soul, but in your case it was necessary, you have gone too far. I’ll have to take your place, we cannot allow you to know Antelope Cobbler… even just knowing who he is would jeopardize everything.”
Now your Henry number 1 is in trouble. Let’s go back to the game of seduction. The subjective shows you the beginning of the struggle, the two hurl themselves against each other, they entwine, they overturn and they get up, your point of view, the subjective, moves backwards, exits the room. You can no longer see the two Henrys, but you hear noises of furniture and objects falling and breaking. A long slow tracking shot takes you out of the house, showing you first a corridor, then the threshold of the front door that magically closes as soon as the subjective moves a few meters away from the entrance. It remains there, still framing the door. The noises of the commotion generated by the struggle are not only more distant, but also more sparse, then, silence. Long pause. And then you hear footsteps approaching, the door opens and you see Henry crossing the threshold, he stops, straightens his clothes, looks around, looks into the room, smiles and exits the frame. The end!

> Download PDF score – part I
> Download PDF score – part II

Sostieni nusica.org

nusica.org è un’associazione no profit che promuove la cultura musicale.
Partecipa al progetto con una donazione di 14 euro e riceverai il cd in regalo.