Hazardues Area

Concerto Teatro Uomo is a live album by Italian Jazz fusion band Area released in 1996 and recorded in in Milan, while the band was supporting their fifth album Maledetti (Maudits). The album was criticized for its sound quality (it was not professionally recorded, unlike their 1975 live album Are(A)zione) and for some packaging errors, but was also praised for its musical content (including extended improvisations) and for Demetrio Stratos' useful information about the tracks during banter between songs. This album was repackaged with another posthumous live album Parigi-Lisbona in the boxset Live Concerts Box.

Undoubtedly one of the more adventurous, Area were also a very important band on the seventies Italian prog scene, their first four albums in particular come highly recommended and essential listening to anyone discovering the RPI genre.
In 1978 Area left the independent label Cramps and released their first album for a major, CGD, "1978 Gli Dei Se Ne Vanno, Gli Arrabbiati Restano!" (1978, the gods are going away, the angry people remain). In that year Italian post '68 protest movements were losing strength after ten years of hopes and contradictions and the members of the band, one of the most committed on the Italian scene, went through a period of personal crises too…

According to classic 1970s dictums, 1975's Are(A)zione is a "live" record by Italian vanguard progressive rock group Area. Taking one song from each of its four previous albums (recorded at as many festivals) and adding a complete freakout on the title track for over 15 minutes, the band nonetheless gives the impression that this is from a single performance. Area's energy and intensity were unequaled by anyone on either side of the Atlantic - rumor has it that Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who headlined a gig in Italy, wouldn't come onto the stage for a full two hours because they didn't want to follow the band that had driven ELP's crowd intro a frenzy…

Appearing as it did in 1973, Area's debut album must have sounded to the average Italian pop critics like the end of the world. Issued on the Cramps label, the album highlighted Area's early sound, which featured overt folk melodies, Canterbury Scene prog rock, acid psychedelia, and vanguard jazz all filtered through a particularly Italian sensibility.
Those who came to love PFM later will not be able to handle the beautiful - yet very disciplined - weirdness of Area, at least on this disc. The Soft Machine comparisons are inevitable, especially in the free jazz sax blowing of Victor Eduardo Busnello…

Area's second album takes its cues from the most serious side of early-'70s British progressive rock, particularly Soft Machine and King Crimson. There's a high-voltage, at times furious energy to the quasi-jazz-rock fusion, with keyboards showing some influence from Miles Davis fusion records, and the guitars wheeling off lines with a busy anxiety. This is the first album that contains the better known line up, with Ares Tavolazzi replacing Patrick Djivas on bass.
This album is notable also for being the first one in which experimental music is introduced. For example "MIRage? Mirage!" contains a part in which the whole band can be heard whispering readings (for example a negative review of "Arbeit Macht Frei", a TV guide…), and "Lobotomia" is constructed using loud synth noise, with the clear intention to disturb the listener…

Live 2012 is the ninth album by Area. It was recorded in 2011 and 2012 during their reunion tour, which marked the return of Paolo Tofani and Ares Tavolazzi who had left the band in 1977 and 1993, respectively. Classic drummer Giulio Capiozzo died in 2000 of a heart attack, his replacement is drummer Walter Paoli. The album is divided in two parts. The first CD includes old songs by the band, in new arranged versions. Most of them are instrumentals (due to the absence of Demetrio Stratos, who died in 1979), except for "La Mela di Odessa", narrated by Tofani, and "Cometa Rossa", sung by special guest singer Maria Pia de Vito…

Crac! is the third album from Italy's progresssive rock band Area. Favoring incredibly complex rhythms à la King Crimson, the group's fusion of folk and ethnic music, leftist political diatribe, and free jazz and hard rock coalesces into a distinctive sound further accented by the abstractions of vocalist Demitrio Stratos. His inimitable avant-garde vocal techniques are something to be heard to be believed, and the agility with which the ensemble cuts between genres and motifs is astonishing, deploying techniques way ahead of their time. Laced with high energy and abundant humor, Crac! is a standout concept album in avant-garde and progressive rock scenes.