Industrial, 2022

artist’s note:

Recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics suggest that war veterans suffering from PTSD might be passing on the legacy of their trauma to their children and grandchildren, notably in the form of neurological disorders. That is to say that environmental factors can modify the way your DNA will be transcribed and affect which genes will be expressed in your descendants.

I have a very short fuse, poor impulse control, a poor sense of time, difficulty maintaining focus and close to zero tolerance for other people’s random noises. My father used to ascribe this to our family’s “boiling Calabrian blood”. But I have a different theory: I call it inherited ADHD.

My Italian grandfather was drafted into an artillery unit during the Second World War and deployed in North Africa. In October 1942, his division fought in the Battle of El Alamein, the first major Axis defeat. Day and night, without interruption, the British rained heavy artillery on Italian positions, inflicting massive casualties. Plagued by inadequate equipment and incompetent leadership, the Italians did not stand a chance. My grandfather narrowly escaped being torn to shreds and spent the rest of his life nervously chain-smoking with a sad, haunted look in his eyes. PTSD didn’t enter the medical vocabulary until the aftermath of the Vietnam war.

I am an angry man. My whole life I kept being told that I had “so much potential” — yet I inexplicably fell short of expectations. My parents attributed this to laziness and a lack of perseverance. My employers kept warning me about my lack of punctuality. Only when I was 42 years old did I finally put the ADHD puzzle together, which suddenly cast my entire existence in a very different light: that I really had done my best, but nobody ever could see what I was struggling with. This new reality was not an easy thing to process, but still it’s nothing compared to the hardship endured by my grandfather.

In the light of new theories about epigenetic mechanisms, it would appear that my struggles are quite possibly directly related to those of my nonno: a kind of family curse, if you will. Courtesy of Mussolini. So not only did the Fascists’ blind thirst for conquest break my grandfather, but it also might have reached out across generations to fuck with my brain chemistry before I was even born.

I was never close to my grandfather. I didn’t speak his language and he could barely speak mine. This mini-album is a salute to his courage and resilience in a cruel, absurd world.

Rest in peace, Giuseppe. For you the noise is over.

album link: https://noradnoise.bandcamp.com/album/giuseppe