Michele Ducci — Snail in the Clouds — A Film for Songs

Snail in the Clouds – A Film for Songs is a stunning, wildly inventive animated film by Michele Ducci and Letizia Mandolesi, populated by a world of fascinating and loveable creatures. It serves as a companion piece to the album Snail in the Clouds, released on June 5th 2026 on Montreme Records.

The plot of the film centers on a dream about a planet, experienced by a sleeping airplane passenger during turbulence. It serves as a variation on Plato's Allegory of the Cave and a study on clouds and turbulence - much like the upheaval brought by the arrival of alphabetic language and the Sophists in ancient Greece, long before the Al Cloud.

The dream is about a planet called Snail, inhabited by hybrids - primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans - who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the Ark of Melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.

Drawing on influences including Brecht, Godard, Kafka, Dragon Ball, Il Candelaio by Giordano Bruno, Carmelo Bene and La rana e lo scorpione by Rocco Ronchi (to whom the film is dedicated), the film was created according to Ducci:

“To invent a world that tells us what ours is like. Creating a monad: a mix between a film animation, a music album, and a philosophical operetta on the Pythagoreans that unites all artistic media in a single matriosque, using video clips as the songs are used in the Brechtian theatre read in an art pop key.”

A limited edition vinyl pressing of 200 copies of Snail in the Clouds will be released later in July. You can pre-order it from The Monotreme Records shop or from Bandcamp.

TRACKLISTING

01. More Than One but Less Than Two

02. Rain on Me

03. Don't Stress Her

04. Agostos Adieu

05. Woman Like You

06. Follow the Sun

07. Orson Sells (Aria di Sorbetto)

08. Next to Me

09. Alabaster

10. Outro