M.elle le “Gladiator” is the fifth studio album by Franco Battiato and was released in 1975 on the Bla Bla label. When Battiato released this work he was influenced by American composer John Cage, a pioneer of chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments and electronic music and by Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German composer known for his work in electronic music and for introducing aleatory techniques into serial composition. As you can guess, this album is marked by a strong experimentalism, there are almost no traces of rock or pop and listening to it could be very difficult...
The album features only three instrumental tracks. The first one, “Goûtez and comparez” is a kind of fuzzy patchwork, just a long sequence of scattered sounds, bits of conversations and poems, hints of songs taken from radio broadcasts, music performed on piano or VCS3, percussion patterns or simple noises, all assembled together and blended with the collage technique...
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| The Monreale Cathedral organ |
The last two tracks, “Canto fermo” and “Orient effect”, are cuts taken from a pipe organ improvisation session recorded with poor means in the Monreale Cathedral, near Palermo. This particular church organ was built between 1957 and 1967 by the Ruffatti Brothers of Padua and it was the sole European organ with six keyboards with 61 keys each and 10 thousand pipes in wood and metal subdivided in three sounding bodies: a great instrument with a tremendous potential but, in my opinion, a weak performance...
On the whole, this is an album that might be recommended only to die-hard fans and collectors.
You can listen to it HERE
Michael Berry: Probably my favorite of his avant works of the middle to late 70's. In fact I enjoy and listen to this album more than Fetus and Pollution. Only behind Clic and Sulle Corde di Aries as my favorite 70's Battiato albums... (read the complete review HERE)
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Battiato is the sixth album by Franco Battiato and was released in 1977 on the Ricordi label. There’s no trace of rock on it, it’s pure avant-garde and experimentalism, a challenging work that is really hard to understand and appreciate. To be honest, I find it almost unbearable...
The first side of the original LP is entirely occupied by “Za”, a long piece for piano solo (here played by Antonio Ballista) that in the liner notes is described as follows: “Apparently poor. Almost completely based on one chord. Deliberately percussive (the right pedal is never used), it splits and subtracts resonances, with a release technique. It needs a listening that could be defined as meta-analytical, in favour of a timeless non-spatiality”. In my opinion, it’s just something that might drain out your all your patience as a music listener, drop after drop...
The second side of the LP is completely filled with another long experimental track, “Café-Table-Musik”, whose title derives from a phrase with which Marcel Proust had defined some of his books, i.e. coffee table books. It’s a kind of clumsy collage of sounds with soprano vocals, romantic piano patterns, fragments of dialogues, reciting voices and even treacherous hints of melody. This piece is described by the composer in the liner notes as a piece of European regression, a sort of Orphic-collage; full of substitutions, manipulations, false quotes, or rather original copies where the piano scale becomes melody, the exercise of voice, feeling... Freedom from the known for the known... In my opinion, it’s just another way to wear out your patience as a music listener, if any trace of patience was left after listening to the previous track...
On the whole, a deliberate sonic torture for your ears, but not without a kind of perverse, self-ironic charm.
Anyway, you can judge for yourselves by listening to the complete album HERE
Michael Berry: It is great music for a rainy Sunday morning... just remember the headphones so your wife or girlfriend doesn't toss your stereo out the window... (read the complete review HERE)
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Juke Box is the seventh studio album by Franco Battiato and was released in 1978 on the Ricordi label. It was originally conceived as the soundtrack of a TV series about the life of Filippo Brunelleschi but eventually it wasn’t used to comment the scenes on the screen. Here Franco Battiato (vocals, piano) acts as a classical composer and avant-garde performer with the collaboration of Giusto Pio (violin), Juri Camisasca (vocals), Antonio Ballista (piano), Alide Maria Salvetta (soprano vocals) and Roberto Cacciapaglia (orchestra director). I fear, however, that the result of his efforts on this album might sound disappointing to most of the listeners...
The opener, “Campane” (bells) is a short, ethereal piece composed for soprano, violins and piano with a disquieting atmosphere. The following “Su scale” (On scales) is a piece for vocals, choir and two pianos that sounds like a whiny dirge... A disconcerting piece for two violins, “Martyre celeste”, closes the first side of album.
Side two opens with a piece for soprano and piano, “Hiver”, sung in French with lyrics taken from a poem by Fleur Jaeggy... “Sometimes in the twilight the monotony, but I was gentle / I complied with what I assumed was the order of the universe...”. Next comes “Agnus”, a piece for vocals, soprano, nine violins, two trumpets and piano. Its nice melodic lines will later find a better use in a track from the 1979 album L’era del cinghiale bianco entitled “Stranizza d’amuri”. Then, a long, irritating piece for solo violin entitled “Telegrafi” (Telegraphs) ends the album.
On the whole, just a soporific experiment...
You can listen to the album HERE
Franco Battiato: Juke Box (1978). Other opinions:
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L’Egitto prima delle sabbie is the last album of Battiato’s experimental period and was released in 1978 on the Ricordi label. It's an instrumental work of extreme minimalism without the slightest trace of rock and featuring only two long tracks...
The title track is a piece for piano solo... Just one chord, a single short arpeggio repeated more and more times for almost fifteen minutes. It was a kind of research on the natural harmonic sounds generated by the first wave of notes played... It was awarded with the “Stockhausen Prize” but I fear that most of the progressive rock fans would find it boring to say the least...
The second track, “Sud Afternoon” is a piano duo composed by Battiato and performed by Antonio Ballista and Bruno Canino, two classical musicians. This composition is another piece of “contemporary classical minimalist avant-garde”, slightly more articulated than the previous one but in my opinion in the same bleak mood...
On the whole, an album that might be of some interest just for connoisseurs of contemporary classical avant-garde...
If you dare, listen to the complete album HERE
David “Guldbamsen”: As a big fan of Franco Battiato and his ever changing sonic routes, this album completely threw me off balance. The man has always done things his own way, but the transition he made from his first four progressive rock albums to the minimalist approach found on subsequent albums made my head spin. I guess you could spot certain Stockhausen influences on an album like 'Clic', but they in no way prepared you for the white shimmering nothingness of this, his final minimalist installation, 'L'Egitto Prima Delle Sabbie'... (read the complete review HERE)
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