Dalia Donadio - Poem Pot Plays Pantano (2020)

Dalia Donadio is back: The new album Poem Pot Plays Pantano is dedicated to the work of the Swiss-Sicilian poet Daniele Pantano. On the first album there were still poets of various origins, the trio around the singer Donadio, the guitarist Urs Müller and the bassist Raphael Walser are now completely immersed in Pantano's world: All texts come from the band Dogs in Untended Fields / Dogs in neglected fields (The series vol. 28, 2015 Wolfbach Verlag Basel / Zurich).

These poems sound fine-ironic to striking-grotesque, they deal with exile, with translingualism, and in an un Swiss way with Switzerland. The red-white-red flag is waving and inspires the almighty Alps. But chess games, hot date markets and cold fjords also ensure strong language images.

The album presents itself as a heterogeneous aggregate: casual jazz hits in Last visit, free improvisations in Morning walk or singer-songwriter atmosphere in Writing the city ensure a wide temperature range. The cool-melancholic mountain life with painted guitar is replaced by the nervous and hot Vaudeville full of improvisation. This creates a finely woven three-part voice from Donadio's changeable voice, sometimes quoting dreamily as in Beyond the stop sign: Swiss Landscape, sometimes soundingly insisting like in Time. From Müller's electric guitar, which opens wide spaces like in Eastern village with factory. And from Walser's double bass, which acoustically grounds and directs, brakes and drives like in Late December.