Venetian Power
The Arid Land
First reissue ever by Vinyl Magic, a faithful reproduction of the 1971 original LP: an item which is practically impossible to find in any way! A 15-piece group from Venezia, that can be hardly described as a prog band, Venetian Power were in fact a theatre group formed by composer Claudio Ambrosini to represent his The arid land play in northern Italy. A musical group was also created by Ambrosini with danish guitarist Claes Cornelius (a popular session musician at the time in Italy) and an LP was released with the soundtrack. Among the musicians the former keyboardist of Le Stelle di Mario Schifano, Nello Marini. The idea for the album came to producer and engineer Ermanno Velludo with Claes Cornelius (from The Blues Right Off) that was just coming back to Italy after a year in the USA, and they decided to help Claudio Ambrosini in his musical adaptation of T.S.Eliot's "The waste land", recording it in Velludo's own small studio. Having been denied an authorization to go ahead by Eliot's publishers Faber & Faber in London, Ambrosini had to change a part of the script that was renamed "The arid land". With a group of Venetian musicians and singers, the first version of the soundtrack was very primitive but thanks to Ermanno's wizardry it sounded as if recorded in a major studio. The recording was indeed a soundtrack for a first rendition of the musical, that was multi-level, multi-action and a 360 degree theatrical event (later to be replicated at the Contemporary Music Biennale in Venice in a much bigger setting. CBS records in Milano were interested in releasing the soundtrack and the whole thing was re-recorded at Milano Recording, CBS's own studio. The surrealistic sci-fi painter Mario de Luigi did the cover, having long specialized in painting Venetian vistas in a future state of decay, de Luigi was of course the most appropriate person to ask for a cover artwork in the essence of the subject matter of the musical.