The history of music has seen, in female voices, reach very high levels of technique and lyricism.
If we exclude the famous opera singers, the black voices of soul and jazz and the white experimenters, rock and songwriting, given their more popular matrix, have been able to combine vocal aesthetics with composition, bringing to the fore numerous female singers established themselves not only for their vocal skills but for their ability to express art in music.
Well, the nineties saw in the multi-instrumentalist and singer Lida Husik (Red Emma) one of the most worthy daughters of that hallucinated rock, born in the late sixties and then became immortal, and in Lisa Germano the perfect representative of the moods and unease made a woman of a whole generation.
Born and raised in Washington, after studying violin, Husik devotes herself to drums, collaborating with Velvet Monkeys and appearing in brief appearances on other people's records; in 1991, discovered by Eddie Kramer and hired at her stable, she prints the album "Upper Lip”(Shimmy Disc), a“ hallucinogenic ”record in which Husik unleashes her visions and her passion for psychedelic art and culture. Paranoia from suburban carousel and LSD-corrected cotton candy, "Bozo" is a perfect mix of sour melody and experimentation (s) composed, a record "Framhouse”For“ Hateful Hippy Girls ”.
I always wondered what was going through Lisa Germano's head in the "Totò e Peppino" of "Geek di Girl", before my every question was swept away by the certainty of the masterpiece disc, already hidden in the ballad "My Secret Reason".
Germano, born in Mishawaka (Indiana), is more than a singer-songwriter: she is the embodiment of all the paranoia, uncertainties, moods and discomforts of a female generation, which culminate, in 1994, in the perfection of "Geek The Girl”(4AD, 1994), an ideal concept on the state of women in her difficult path to emancipation.
The whole work is played on absence and simplification, on the stripping of the soul and psyche, and is sung with an almost infantile and autistic voice; an exact secret diary, personal and intimate but at the same time ecumenical, made up of drawings with outlines now round, now squared, (s) colored by light and dark pastel shades.
Marco Sica
