The memories come all at once. Not the fog of beach vacations to Rimini at the height of the season, but the year-round fog that clings to the southern portion of the Jura Mountains. The fog of youth, memories stashed on the outskirts of a bankrupt Swiss town. A neighborhood of apartment blocks, housing co-ops, former workers' quarters, detached cottages, bizarre chalets, grotesque condominiums. Their inhabitants are as varied and haphazard as the architecture. Tossed and turned, beastly, mud-covered, running beyond the break into the nearby woods. A child stunted by fetal alcohol syndrome watches over his shaman of a mother. Boys beat the fog into blocks with their imaginary sabers, shed it like a dress in the evening, hang it up on a wardrobe already overloaded with coats. Italian is spoken in this neighborhood. In this neighborhood, misery is not a secret: it penetrates the always-drawn curtains and seeps into the streets. No one calls the police. Eventually they come of their own accord. Hope lies in ambiguity, in the inherent multilingualism—glittering, kitschy, many-colored, music that is melancholy one minute and striving the next.

Five years after their self-titled debut, MISTER MILANO returns to explore the sonic and lyrical terrain of I RAGAZZI DELLA NEBBIA. Their setting: the foggy youth they once inhabited, or might have. The accuracy matters less than the story. On stage, i raggazi of the present place bass, drums and organ … they add congas, imbuing the fog with a touch of that diffuse, barely middle-class wanderlust. A barroom piano. A grand piano for their dreams of someday becoming famous. A little Lucio Battisti for a much-needed drop of sunshine. Wednesday afternoons spent behind neglected hedges, crooked fences. Here, an overly tidy front-yard garden. There, an overgrown cornfield. A wholesome-looking corner bakery. A stinking butcher shop. A kiosk. Another kiosk. What’s inside that innocent-looking store?