Read full review in italian on versacrum.com

Recorded in a single day at the end of August 2022, Variants is a compact yet layered work, in which Capricorni Pneumatici tackle the very concept of “variation” — musical, biological, political — with surgical clarity. The title also conveys several meaning: it alludes to the classical form of sound variation, but it also gains meaning in its reference to viral “variants,” those that have invaded public, media, and ideological lexicon in recent years.

The album borrows these fragments of reality and reformulates them through the language of sound. Each track is a mutation of elements already explored previously by the collective, but here rendered unrecognizable: a recombination work that goes beyond form, touching the very essence of sonic identity. The result is an restless organism, never stable, that breathes through manipulated field recordings, fractured digital textures, interrupted beats, and deviated harmonies. It’s music that seems to speak a mutating language, teetering between the present and a contaminated future. In this sense, Variants is not just an album: It is a sonic condition, a landscape built on what remains after the fracture. It doesn’t fit into any codified genre, but it builds its own: pandemic post-industrial , not so much as a label but as an atmosphere.

The listening experience is permeated by a constant tension, as if each sound were a withheld question, or a diagnosis without a report. The choice to title the tracks with names of supposed viral variants underscores the critical intent of the project: not denunciation, but unmasking. Behind every “variant,” one can glimpse the shadow of the dominant narrative, the ambiguity of scientific data used as a tool of control or confusion. Music thus becomes the place where these forms dissolve and transform.

Decisive in this process is the visual contribution of HinnyMower, an artist who has already collaborated with CP (in The Erivar and Dissections) and who here signs powerful, visionary, precise images. Her illustrations do not explain the album, but amplify it, projecting onto it a biologically hallucinatory aesthetic that reflects – and distorts – contemporary paranoia. Her hybrid creatures, pseudo-viral patterns, and fantasies of danger serve as a visual counterpoint to the album’s soundscape, in a game of mirrors between the real and the constructed. Variants is an album that questions, rather than accompanies. It requires attention, but it offers perspective. In a time saturated with official versions, it proposes its personal mutation: sonic, visual, political. A necessary variant.