Fottutissima Pellicceria Elsa – Fottutissima Pellicceria Elsa

I’ve always had a fascination for taking things literally. As a very bad student who had never taken a philosophy class, I developed an obsession with Wittgenstein’s early work. What intrigued me was his idea that philosophy's main problems were just poorly posed questions. Questions are questions only if they have an answer, he’d put forward, and philosophical questions have no answers. Thus, they are not questions. He was convinced to have killed philosophy forever.

Fottutissima Pellicceria Elsa were an Italian punk band who only released one demo tape in 1983, repressed on vinyl in 2013 by US label S-S, and they took things very literally. Punk as aggressive, anti-commercial, free expression can’t be found in purer form than on this album. Most songs sound improvised, flowing freely between fast and slow parts, stopping and then picking up again, alternating almost beautiful instrumental parts with ugly, buzzing, raging noise.

On the back of the tape, a disclaimer reads: “Some people could find this unlistenable, and to them we say that, after all, nice little music and impeccable recordings aren’t all that it takes to make a hope come true, but rather free thought, discourse and will.” You will find a few bars of fast, deranged Italian hardcore in the vein of contemporaries such as Eu’s Arse or Wretched, but on the whole the experience is akin to listening a tape of those bands melting on a slab of tar. Or like if somebody took Tampax’s side of the HitlerSS split, put it through a dozen tape dubs, and threw it in your face at an anti-military demonstration.

Singer Roby’s delivery is so snotty and full of disgust, even when he makes absolutely sensible (and still valid) points about speciesism, traditional family, conformism, and the state, he sounds like a very drunk teenager trying to pick a fight. I don’t know if it’s fair to treat this as “avantgarde" when it was probably just trying to be very straightforward, literal punk music to fuck the system to, but I’m pretty sure fans of Ornette Coleman would enjoy this more than a lot of punks.

It's amazing how these days any punk tape from the remotest past is being reissued on vinyl, even Fottutissima Pellicceria Elsa's, possibly the worst-recorded of all times? It's really hard to understand what's going on in these furious and raw attempts at playing hardcore punk. It's an uninterrupted mess of anger and noise, definitely an interesting document for devoted completists of the early hardcore years in Italy. For occasional punk listeners it might even sound unintentionally comical, especially the name of the band itself ("Fucking Elsa Furrier's").