"Parti de mal" (traditional 'chanson de croisade' dated 1189)
That song was born during the '99 summer tour, a tribute to the chivalrous ideal that unites us. It's a traditional song but completely reinvented. Known only by one of us it was a birth for the others. We were in Mainz in a very suggestive cellar and we sang that tune which has become in some way the seal of our mission.


Saderaladon" (traditional French 'ministrel song')
This is the second song born during that afternoon in Mainz and played live for the first time the following day in Heidelberg. This track gives us lots of energy and liveliness, it's a panacea, we cannot explain the reason why each time we play it we find ourselves radiant. A traditional song completely re- elaborated and revisited. An hymn.


"Belle Jolande" (music by ATARAXIA, lyrics extracted from 'Chanson de toile' anonym of the XIIth century, langue d'oïl)
After a painful period of tension and negative events, we found ourselves in green fields strewn with yellow striking up middle age songs in the spring which had became an early summer. In our opinion this is one of the most beautiful medieval tracks belonging to our intense musical history. Played at the foot of the hill among the rows of vine and the curious cats witnessing the creation, it will remain imprinted for a long time in my memory.


"Il bagatto" (French Renaissance ballad, lyrics by Vittorio Vandelli)
A French Renaissance song played and re-elaborated by many musical ensembles. Our version reinvented, reinterpreted and carried naturally in the Italy of the communes during Humanism is a tribute to our rich cultural tradition.

"Mon Âme Sorcière"
A waltz of French inspiration made of accordeon, clarinet and grey of pond getting coloured and changing of colours quickly. The song I would have always wanted to sing being like a part of me, I have a sorceress soul made of confetti and eyes that fall in well and potions of life with which I poison myself. That motif is strong and solitary, made of this loneliness which is not heavy but makes us regain our wild and courageous spirit. I think of "La Malédiction d'Ondine" again and I feel that this song is the daughter of 'June', it's 'June' the way I would have always wanted to do it.


"Eleven"
Crossing the Mediterranean sea on the deck of a ferry-boat to get Greece............


"Mnemosine"
Very sad and elegiac music. It belongs to these beautiful and harrowing compositions of Vittorio which still have the power to surprise me. This is one of these motives that when it's written immediately belongs to everybody since we all have made it our own living and rewritten it with our suffering. This is again a song linked to a child and water or maybe to the rings of water concealing the child who struggles in such a big silence and in such a wide extending of surfaces of experience that separate what was united.


I love every waving thing"
We can't restrain the impulse to speak of water through music. This ethereal and bewitching track, full of spirals is made of some Pessoa's words and the intense grey water of the Atlantic ocean when on a windy cliff of the Lusitanian coast you stop there and intensely desire to be carried away, to disappear in the foam, to close the circle. A track of water and sad childhood that has never ended. "I spent the fly of my days spying the sea, there are waves in my soul."

"Encrucijada" (part I / part II)
Dramatic, myterious, fiery track but at the same time dry like the earth. A ritual of love and death that becomes bloody after an incessant emotional tension and then vanishes. That motif depicts the hispanic universe as we perceived and elaborated it at one time. Passion and blood : a gothic flamenco


. "Funeral in Datça"
Some summers ago we found ourselves in a peninsula in the south-west of Turkey and we decided to visit an antique Greek site. On the way along a cleared and dusty road we heard laments and saw a long line of people moving with an ondulatory movement. It was a modest and dignified Moslem funeral, the thing that most struck us was that coffin of unusual dimensions, of a warm colour, a bright brown with on top a rainbow-coloured carpet. My eyes are still wandering with this ondulating coffin that was travelling quickly on the hands of those people who were passing it each other. The little envelope was sailing lightly and shining between the earth and the sky in the spreading of the crowd. I remember also the long braids of the women, young and old, red braids, black, auburn, brilliant like the threads of the carpet on the flying little coffin. I felt that sooner or later I'll have to write this memory and the lyrics came first, then the music, a march with deep vocals and then a rising up into the limpid air.


"The corals of Aqaba"
The first time I heard that song born for the classical guitar I thought immediately of the spring that precedes the Easter days and the childhood I lived wild and swift in the Emiliane mountains. The crystal sound was the one of the river, of the bells in the distance, of the murmur of the grass in which I ran untamed, of this pure essence, fighting and courageous that was in me in my childhood. I've associated all that to the thousands refractions of the corals in the gulf of Aqaba. "My steps bring me far-away, in places that I visited in the dazzle of the sleep or during the long summer wakefullnesses when I made me grassy expanse hearing the sound of the flute on the shore of the river."


"(To the Mighty) Nemrut Dagi"
A powerful and rhythmic march sung with virile but graceful voices, an hymn to the mighty of the world who disappeared leaving traces of themselves through mausoleum and monuments eroded and consumed by history. Nemrut Dagi (the mount Nemrut in Anatolia) is the place where is situated in open air the majestic mausoleum of Antioco I, some immense statues of symbolic animals and his face made of stone rising up on the high plateau are eroded since centuries burned by the sun and whipped by the snows and winter winds. A place of the imagination belonging to our journey that Giovanni has skillfully depicted.


piece of writing by Francesca Nicoli
kindly translated into English by Nicolas Ramain


ATARAXIA are :

Francesca Nicoli : voice, lyrics, flute, cymbal, bells
Vittorio Vandelli : classic guitar, chitarra battente, acoustic guitar,
electric guitar, percussions, drums, vocals
Giovanni Pagliari : keyboards, vocals

special guest in "Sueños" :
Francesco Banchini : clarinet, traverse flute, drums, vocals