I read somewhere that May 8 is Elena Fossi's birthday.  If you don't know that name, you're unaware of one of the great singers of modern times.  Italian, she's the vocalist/frontwoman of the band Kirlian Camera, and has also sung in Stalingrad, Siderartica, and Spectra Paris.  I came across Kirlian Camera on YouTube one night in 2008 or 2009.  I was looking for clips from Michelangelo Antonioni's great film, L'Eclisse (The Eclipse).  I enjoy looking at pieces of movies, sometimes.  To watch several fragments of various films in one sitting is like reading an essay: a group of ideas put together into a bundle to contemplate, making connections from various viewpoints and visions.
     That night I watched a scene from L'Eclisse.  In the recommended column for that particular selection was a thumbnail showing a tall woman singing a song, "Eclipse," for a band called Kirlian Camera.  I clicked on the thumbnail, a simple act starting the process that eventually made Elena Alice Fossi my favorite singer.
     It isn't simply the fact that she's beautiful (she is), or that her stage presence is magnetic.  Fossi's voice, its expansive range and tonal expressiveness, does something to my emotions as I listen.  When I hear Doris Day sing a ballad, I cry.  When I hear Elena Fossi sing "In the Endless Rain," "Dead Zone in the Sky," "Falsos Sueños," "Ascension," I also cry, but with an added sense of having encountered something holy, like an unexpected encounter with a spiritual thought coming to quick light in my brain.  I'm not a religious person, but I am sometimes deeply affected by encounters with particularly effective artists, such as Fossi and Kirlian Camera's founder, Angelo Bergamini, whose work with keyboards rivets my attention, the blending of non-vocal sounds never failing to bring new worlds to my ears.
     The artistic combination of these two, Bergamini and Fossi, is one of the great things to happen to music in the last two decades.  If you haven't heard Kirlian Camera, nor seen them performing in YouTube clips, and you're of a mind to open up to something truly fascinating and powerful, this band, with its remarkable singer, is well worth experiencing.

                                                                              Vic Neptune