On the cover of the first DVD-release of the Italian prog rock band
Mangala Vallis,
we see a space shuttle shaped as a trunk
hopping between several European cities to collect concert footage. The six
musicians of Mangala Vallis are on board of the shuttle accompanied by a boy
who chose to become a werewolf… Together they collected some stuff certainly
worth watching. However, most of the footage has been shot with only one camera
and that doesn’t look very professional to me. It’s a shame that bad amateur
footage is sometimes used as bonus material on several concert DVD’s. Fortunately,
this is not the case with the material on this rather low-budget release. Drummer
Gigi Cavalli Cocchi and his fellow musicians must have collected
a lot of material from fans in the past, but they only picked out the images suitable
for a larger audience.
The first fifty minutes were shot at the Prog Decennio Festival in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands. I witnessed this strong performance myself. However, the band played a lot longer than the fifty minutes on this DVD. They probably would prevent this DVD from duplications. Most of the tracks have been taken from the band’s second album Lycanthrope. However, from their strong debut album The Book Of Dreams we can enjoy The Journey, Is The End The Beginning, A New Century and Days Of Light. The latter two have been included in the footage from the Zoetermeer gig and the other two are excerpts from the Fidenza Show in Italy. The overall sound on this disc is very good with fine close-ups of all the musicians. Just too bad that they couldn’t film keyboardist Enzo Cattini in a proper way so that you can see how he’s playing his synths. The band also used a couple of tricks like double vision and images alternating between black-and-white and colour to obtain a more professional look. 
Luckily, Mangala Vallis included the PFM-song
Traveller as an encore.
Bernardo Lanzetti also sang this piece on
the original PFM-recordings. You can witness another PFM-classic on the almost ten
minute long footage of the band’s performance at the Prog Sud Festival in
Marseille (2006) and a far too short clip of
Impressioni Di Settembre. There’s also an interview with bassist
Riccardo Sgavetti and
Mr. Lanzetti
in France. The latter is talking about record companies and the way they ‘fuck
up’ the music business… The most professional recordings have been filmed
during a TV-show in Milano, Italy. In general, the old black-and-white movie
effects are quite good. You can see the band doing a short sound check, but you
also get a close look at the strange glove Bernardo used in order to give his
voice special effects during The Mask. On
The Transparent And The Obscure,
Daniela Galli’s
doing some fine background vocals.
The band’s performance at the Teatro Magnani in Fidenza in 2005 has been filmed with just one camera continuously from the same spot. The thirty minutes of this performance are in black-and-white. That is not the ‘usual’ black-and-white, but the kind that matches very well with the colours of the clips taken from Carl Zeman ’s Adventures Fantastiques. Those clips, shown during several instrumental passages, feature elements that might have been taken from the old novels written by Jules Verne. The DVD ends with two videos that tell something about the story of Lycanthrope. On the menu, this segment is called Lycantropus Ducalis. The first video, The Boy That Howls At The Moon, has black-and-white images including the musician’s clothes. It’s nice to see that the band used a real mellotron and a MiniMoog to make it look more realistic. The second video, The Mask, is in full colour and is nothing more than a masquerade indeed. After the final credits, the trunk of old souvenirs from the days keyboardist Enzo Cattini was still a band member, is empty. Let’s hope that shortly the same crew of astronauts will collect more footage from other cities around the world. As far as I’m concerned, the material on this DVD was very entertaining. *** Henri Strik (edited by Peter Willemsen), pictures by Arthur Haggenburg Where to buy? |
