Dedicato a FrazzSemiramis

The most frantic record on the Italian prog island was made by teenagers, and then it vanished. Drop the needle on La bottega del rigattiere and within thirty seconds you half expect something to break: keyboards pile on top of one another, the guitar takes off like a rocket, the drums throw you across the room. This is Italian prog pushed to the edge of what a listener can take — dense, nervy, overloaded with ideas, fifteen albums' worth of them crammed into thirty-seven minutes. And in 1973, the people playing it were kids.

Semiramis formed in Rome in 1970, when they were all fifteen. By the time they walked into the studio, though, the line-up had changed: the original drummer, Memmo Pulvano, left for work reasons shortly before the sessions, and in came Paolo Faenza on drums and vibraphone and Giampiero Artegiani on guitars and keyboards. The record is those two plus Marcello Reddavide on bass, Maurizio Zarrillo on keyboards and his brother Michele — yes, the man who two decades later would become a star of Italian pop — who at sixteen was already writing this music and singing it. The title comes from Frazz, a clown invented by Reddavide, and it is also an acronym: the initials of the five who cut the record, Faenza, Reddavide, Artegiani and the two Zarrillos. They recorded Dedicato a Frazz at Trident Studios between 17 and 28 September 1973. Then, like too many Italian prog bands, they made that one record and disappeared. That's where the legend starts.

It's a concept album about the dreams and dreads of Frazz, but don't listen to it for the plot — listen for the energy. Luna Park is the track everyone quotes, a runaway carousel of organ and guitar; Uno zoo di vetro slows down and breathes; the title track, Frazz, gathers everything into a feverish finale. This isn't polished music — at times it's almost too much, the solos stacking up, the voices shrieking. But it's exactly that adolescent rush, that lack of brakes, that sets it apart from anything else on the island: no grown-up musician would have dared cram in this much.

On vinyl it's one of Italian prog's most hunted grails — a title often claimed, though take it with care: Museo Rosenbach's Zarathustra and Il Balletto di Bronzo's Ys are in the running too. Still, the original is genuinely hard to find. It's the 1973 Trident TRI 1004, a matte gatefold with Gordon Faggetter's unsettling artwork (that face on the front, the Magritte-like interior). The detail that unmasks a first pressing is on the spine: white, with no name or title, and the catalogue number printed by mistake as "DISCO: TRN 1004" — TRN being Trident's prefix for 7" singles. On some copies the error was covered by a sticker carrying the correct TRI 1004: an original either has that sticker or shows its traces (though not all originals were stickered). The side-B label reads "Fabbricato e distribuito dalla Fonit-Cetra, Ediz. Usignolo, ℗ 1973".

And here is an important difference from the island's other grails: Dedicato a Frazz was counterfeited in the late 1980s, so the risk of outright fakes is real, not just of reissues. The green spine with red lettering "SEMIRAMIS DEDICATO A FRAZZ", for instance, is a reissue, not the original. Japanese collectors have chased it for decades, which is part of why prices are what they are: think in orders of magnitude, since they move, but an authentic, complete Trident first sits firmly in the upper range of Italian collecting, with the best copies well beyond. To simply listen, there are honest reissues — Vinyl Magic/BTF and AMS on vinyl, plus the 1989 CD — that do the music justice without bleeding your wallet. Before you spend, compare every version on the Discogs master page: we earn nothing by linking it, which is exactly why it's here — on this record it's your defence against fakes.

If PFM is the island's international gateway — Italian prog made for export — Semiramis is its hidden room: the record that barely came out anywhere, made by kids who then lost the thread, and legendary for exactly that reason. From here the island continues toward Banco's Darwin! and the other grails: for the full map, discographies and "rarografie" included, the reference is Francesco Mirenzi's Rock progressivo italiano. But few records capture so well what happens when five teenagers have more ideas than fit on a single album — and one chance to press them all.