This is the most ambitious record Deus Ex Machina ever made, and it is the one where they added a brass section, apparently for no reason beyond wanting to change how they wrote again. It is also the last album of the Kaliphonia era — the final thing they released before an American label picked them up and the rest of the world found out they existed. One reviewer, having praised it exhaustively, ended by admitting he would really like to know who played the trumpet solos and who arranged the horns. Nobody told him.

The short version

Equilibrismo da insofferenza is the fourth Deus Ex Machina studio album, released in 1998 on Kaliphonia. Alberto Piras sings, in Latin and Italian; Fabrizio Puglisi, who had joined the previous year from a jazz background, plays keyboards; Mauro Collina plays guitars; Alessandro Bonetti plays violin; Alessandro Porreca plays bass; Claudio Trotta plays drums. Added to the six is a horn section — trumpet, alto and baritone saxophone, trombone. Cosmopolitismo centimetropolitano runs nearly eleven minutes and carries a Latin subtitle, Mundani oppidi maximi conferti. The whole thing is credited to Piras and Collina, with Puglisi on the long one.

The end of Kaliphonia

By 1998 the band had been going thirteen years and had a body of work behind them: the rock opera Gladium Caeli, the self-titled album, and De Republica, which many people still call their high water mark. Then three years on the road, playing everywhere and collecting good notices wherever they went, including America. Puglisi arrived in 1997 and brought jazz with him. What followed was the most ambitious thing they had attempted and it changed a great deal after a record widely considered untouchable. Four years later Cuneiform released Cinque, and everything about this band’s reach changed. This is the last album from before that happened.

The sound

A complex record with a more marked jazz-rock imprint than anything before it, which is what the horns are for. Scaruffi described the band as devoted to a vehement, torrential fusion of classical music, jazz and rock, further enriched by the spectacle of Piras’ range, and that holds here more than anywhere. The versatility on display is unmatched by any other European progressive band — the sudden shifts of direction and tempo are unbelievably precise, and appear to be beyond what ordinary players could execute at all. Piras holds a high note longer than seems humanly possible. Add the oddball but perfectly judged vocal approach, in Latin, and there is very little else this consistently original anywhere.

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The songs

Cosmopolitismo centimetropolitano is the favourite and the centrepiece: violin, cutting guitar and infectious staccato organ, played at a speed that suggests Gentle Giant with something urgent to catch. One reviewer reached for a visual analogy and it is the best description anyone has managed — a time-lapse film of a busy city, clouds racing overhead, cars and people scurrying like ants. Positively pyrotechnic. Distrazione infinita is where the musicianship becomes almost frightening. And then Amori difficili, fourth, is a surprisingly conventional duet for acoustic guitar and fretless bass that slows everything down and gives you room to breathe, while still quietly demonstrating that these two could do this all day.

Reception and legacy

For the people who follow this band it belongs in the pantheon, and one American writer called them standard-bearers for the whole current scene. The honest frame comes from a reviewer who revisited the catalogue after Devoto: bands who last a long time go from young, hungry and ambitious to less energetic but more mature, and that is exactly the arc here. This is the young and hungry end of it. In Italy their reputation stayed confined to a niche audience, even though they were central to a modest progressive revival in the nineties — which is the recurring fact about Deus Ex Machina and the reason America mattered so much to them.

The verdict

Essential if Cinque worked on you, and arguably the better record. Cosmopolitismo centimetropolitano first, eleven minutes, undivided attention, and be ready to play it twice. Then Amori difficili immediately after, because the contrast is the whole point and the sequencing knows it. Then Distrazione infinita. This is a band at the peak of what they could physically do, with horns bolted on for the pleasure of making it harder. Four years later the Americans arrived and the world caught up.

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