Franco Battiato - Escaping the Rules of the Universe

Building on a few but crucial constants — erudite research and a wholly personal brand of experimentation — over the last three decades Franco Battiato has released a vast number of albums roaming across the most disparate fields, from progressive rock to the avant-garde, from classical and sacred music to electronics, passing above all through an anomalous kind of pop songwriting suspended between intellectual digressions and commercial tendencies.

Born in Ionia (province of Catania, Sicily) in 1945, Battiato moved to Milan around the age of nineteen. After a few years paying his dues, he landed his first record deals; between 1965 and 1969 he released five or six singles that met with little success. These were extremely simple, highly commercial love songs or beat-influenced tunes (not even written by him, for that matter), following the trend pursued by almost all Italian music of the period. The spark for change came during the 1968 edition of “Un Disco per l'estate”, the famous radio song contest of the time: Battiato realized he was utterly alien to the context surrounding him and, with admirable courage, unhesitatingly broke every contract tying him to that false and deplorable record industry. A brief period of deep personal crisis followed, overcome only with the help of two powerful new interests that would from then on define his way of being and of conceiving musical art: the Sufism of Middle Eastern mystics (not by chance, Arab culture would become the focus of the composer's university studies in the following decade) and electronic music. By the end of the Sixties he had indeed begun exploring synthesizers (making him the first in Italy, and among the first in Europe, at least as far as straightforward rock is concerned) and contemporary musique concrète. Having completed the first of his countless transformations — from young, mediocre singer to experimenter and radical leader of the nascent, if impoverished, Italian underground scene — between 1971 and 1972 Battiato created his first LP, the revolutionary Fetus, released, among other things, by a small independent label. Electro-acoustic atmospheres, an at times violent and reckless use of the VCS3 synth, and small avant-garde gestures characterize this obscure album; it must certainly have been a genuine shock for the shamefully backward Italian pop scene, starting with the cover image itself (a startling photo of a fetus). Amid mournful, Mediterranean-flavored melodies arranged with analog electronic instruments (“Una Cellula”, “Energia, Mutazione”), surreal pieces (the wonderful “Fetus” and the ruthless “Cariocinesi”) and guitar-synthesizer clashes laced with sampled contaminations (“Fenomenologia”, “Anafase” and the excellent “Meccanica”), the record turns out to be a psychedelic journey leaping from the microscopic scale of the cell to the infinity of space, inspired among other things by Aldous Huxley's “Brave New World” (to which it is dedicated). Battiato thus outlines a concept album in hybrid form, suspended between song and embryonic “kosmische musik”.

The dismantling of the song format continued with the second album, Pollution (1973), a genuine work of “avant-garde progressive rock” suspended between existential questions and the issue of pollution, musically mirrored through electronic-rooted “contamination”. The album opens with the sampled waltz of “Il Silenzio Del Rumore”, over which Battiato's spoken voice unfolds, flowing into the brief, emblematic “31 Dicembre 1999 – Ore 9”, with drums accompanying bursts of distorted electric guitar and swelling organ, up to the final war-like explosions. The three tracks that follow arguably represent one of the most original peaks in Southern European rock music: “Areknames”, with its score and lyrics played and sung backwards respectively, unfolds amid harsh melodies for VCS3; in “Beta”, seemingly deranged phrases and brief vibrating effects surround the void (not the “cosmic” one of Schulze or Froese, but Battiato's “mental” one), soon filled however by five sublime minutes in which bass, drums and piano (filtered through the VCS2) intertwine with ethereal vocal effects; in “Plancton” the antithetical struggle between acoustic guitar and synthesizer reaches its formal peak, before being broken by an electro-ethnic finale. The physics principles sung in the title track and the lament of “Ti Sei Mai Chiesto Quale Funzione Hai?” close out this undisputed gem of experimental rock.

Buoyed by the new international experiences he was accumulating during this period — such as shows supporting Brian Eno, Magma, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, John Cale and Nico, among others — and above all thanks to the private lessons given to him by his mentor and friend Karlheinz Stockhausen, as early as 1973 Battiato converted to an even more intellectual and intimate form of avant-garde. Towards the end of the year he released one of his finest works, On the Strings of Aries. This new, deeply serious work remarkably brings together repetitive experimentation, a rather sophisticated electronics, and above all a particular form of acoustic music strongly indebted to the Arab tradition. The time had come to “build something new”, and Battiato does so by doing away with guitars, bass and drums in favor of winds, oboe, cello, mandola, kalimba and prepared piano.

The sixteen minutes of the suite “Sequenze e frequenze” set the parameters of this new style (never revisited on any other album): two synthesizer lines captivate the listener's senses, masterfully winding around each other, until the composer's own voice is layered on top to sketch images of indescribable beauty. The piece then continues for a further thirteen (extremely long!) minutes of musical ecstasy, during which the colorful yet hypnotically repetitive rhythms of more traditional instruments and percussion merge with a continuous backdrop of electronic programming. The sound seems repeatedly to fade and come to an end, but in truth its march never stops; the music becomes a tool for the dissolution of the ego and the exploration of new mental dimensions.

The album is rounded out by the instrumental “Aries” and the two wonderful tracks “Aria di Rivoluzione” and “Da Oriente ad Occidente”, which echo, on a smaller scale, the basic structure of the opening piece.

Next, with yet another reversal of direction, Battiato produced the fourth and probably final masterpiece of his early, experimental discography, the unsettling Click (1974), entirely dedicated to the person and work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Having definitively abandoned the stance of a pure art-rock musician, Battiato turned out seven short, unusual, almost entirely instrumental compositions of experimental electronics. Atmospheres suspended between the bleak and the otherworldly (“I Cancelli Della Memoria”, “Il Mercato Degli Dei”, “Nel Cantiere Di Un'Infanzia”), electronic movements (“No U Turn”, “Propiedad Prohibida”) and noise-based sound collages in the style of John Cage (“Rien Ne Va Plus: Andante”, “Ethika Fon Ethica”) characterize this small work, meticulously crafted in every detail by its author, who alternates between piano, organ, electronic instruments and effects.

No single track stands out above the others, but worth mentioning are above all the deeply mournful “No u turn”, the only piece that is also sung, in which a backwards-recorded part and a normal one are interlocked with each other, and “Propiedad Prohibida”, where a small orchestra of electronic instruments in the “cosmic music” style is used to build an extraordinarily driving momentum that culminates in a gripping final violin solo.

Being the shapeshifter that he is, Battiato nonetheless set about abandoning electronics almost entirely. He embarked on a brief tour of southern Italy as keyboardist for Telaio Magnetico (a group formed for the occasion with some friends from the Italian alternative scene), the recordings of which would yield a live album twenty years later, in 1995 (consisting of vaguely cosmic-flavored improvisations). From the same period comes the record M.elle Le “Gladiator” (1975), which nonetheless falls below the composer's usual standards. About ten minutes of samples and overdubs (far harsher and more dissonant than those on “Click”) give way to roughly twenty disjointed minutes of organ sounds, recorded in the cathedral of Monreale.

It's not entirely clear whether M.lle le Gladiator represents a big, overambitious idea gone wrong, or whether, on the contrary, it is simply a record made up of “experimental filler” meant to disguise, if not a lack of ideas, then at least the author's transitional phase.

Having then moved from the small avant-garde label Bla Bla to the major label Ricordi (which, paradoxically, seems to grant him even greater musical freedom!), this mysterious artist, known to barely a thousand people, devoted himself, for at least two or three years, to erudite classical-avant-garde composition. He spent his days shut up at home in front of the piano trying to give life to new sound forms, and mixed with classical musicians (above all the pianist Antonio Ballista, who performed the recorded versions of Battiato's compositions from this period, and Giusto Pio, his violin teacher and future collaborator on the arrangements of his pop albums from 1979 to 1991). The results of this musical research are documented on the album Battiato (1977). The track “Za” delivers nineteen minutes of obsessive, unforgiving solo-piano music, with acoustic amplification effects and extremely slow variations. The author himself provides a brief description of the piece on the LP sleeve: “Apparently sparse. Almost entirely built from a single chord. Deliberately percussive (the sustain pedal is never used). It divides and subtracts resonances through a release technique. It calls for a listening approach I would describe as meta-analytical, favoring an a-temporal non-spatiality.” Side B of the record features the exquisitely refined collage “Cafe'-Table-Musik” (a name drawn from “coffee-table books”, the expression Proust used to describe his own books). Soprano Maria Salvetta's singing and a few brief spoken parts alternate with gentle piano fragments.

Of lesser importance is the album Juke Box (1978), conceived as the soundtrack for an Italian TV film of the time but then rejected by the film's own makers. It consists of six pieces for piano, violins, soprano and choir. Nothing extraordinary, though the closing track “Telegrafi” is great fun: Giusto Pio's solo violin is “battered” in a thoroughly harrowing way for over six and a half minutes, until the unfortunate listener is mentally exhausted.

The piano lessons of “Za” are taken to their peak by the two long parts that make up Battiato's last truly experimental album proper, titled L'Egitto prima delle Sabbie (1978). In the title track (winner of the international Karlheinz Stockhausen prize that same year), a single fast piano “phrase” is repeated dozens upon dozens of times into infinity without any variation, except in the length of the pauses; this is probably the ultimate example of Battiato's ability to create hypnotic, markedly meditative atmospheres. The second long piece, “Sud Afternoon”, instead highlights the strikingly percussive, almost obsessive quality of the piano's sound.

But suddenly Battiato carried out what may be one of the greatest shifts in style and genre that music history can recall. The gap between L'Egitto prima delle Sabbie and the work that followed is nothing short of disconcerting. The songs on L'Era del Cinghiale Bianco (1979), released by EMI, are genuinely, irresistibly catchy pop songs! And what pop! Having abandoned the avant-garde altogether, Battiato channeled his erudite experimentation into the song format, revealing himself as a consummate intellectual singer-songwriter. For better or worse, the genre coined by the Sicilian artist — and carried forward, albeit in constant flux, over the following decade — fuses, in a thoroughly personal way, music for the masses and music for the few; yet this was no mere compromise: paradoxically, he turned out songs as pleasing to the ear as any ever heard, while at the same time more intellectually demanding than anything heard before. One might perhaps find something vaguely similar elsewhere in the history of music, but in Italy the “Battiato style” was, and still is, something simply unmatched (the existence of precious few true “disciples” proves as much to this day).

Catchy compositions are delivered with rich arrangements built on contamination and originality. Yet it's the lyrics that make the strongest impression: outlining, essentially, a new approach to the stubborn Italian language, Battiato sketches out a reflective form of "pseudo-psychedelia"; these are, in essence, pieces suspended between philosophical meditation and esotericism, often laced with continuous, "all-too" high-minded quotations and "bombardments" of evocative images, at times clearly disconnected from one another.

The peak of this song form is found precisely on the first LP of this new phase. L'Era del Cinghiale Bianco is a pop package that seems to stretch toward many different points at once, from jazz-rock to sacred music, yet (and this is the peculiar thing) always remains, and only ever is, pop music. The title track combines electric guitar and violin riffs with an unrelenting drumbeat, though what really moves the listener is the author's falsetto voice, which starts from emptiness and stretches out to paint a "virtual Orient" (as Battiato himself later described it). It's in fact the same "Orient" evoked in the mock-rock of "Strade Dell'Est", while "Magic Shop" is a harsh reflection on the commercialization of art, culture and, above all, religion. After the classical-leaning instrumental "Luna Indiana", the album's meditative section begins. "Il Re Del Mondo" (a title taken from a work by Guénon) is the record's masterpiece: bass, drums, keyboards, piano and violin masterfully accompany this visionary, melancholy piece (the opening of the first verse is epoch-defining: "Strano come il rombo degli aerei da caccia un tempo/ stonasse con il ritmo delle piante al sole sui balconi."). "Pasqua Etiope" is a pop prayer in Latin and Greek built around an oboe melody. The album closes with "Stranizza D'Amuri", which, besides the peculiarity of being sung in Sicilian dialect, is perhaps the only straightforward love song (in the strict, pure sense of the term) to be found anywhere in the musician's boundless body of work.

The following album, Patriots (1980), for all its originality, is slightly weaker. The music becomes catchier, the arrangements less delicate but just as intricate, with a stronger reliance on electric guitars and electronic sounds. The lyrics turn oddly more ironic, but lose none of their evocative character.

What stands out most is the brilliant social critique of "Up Patriots To Arms", where Battiato's falsetto voice sings, with a tone of resignation, about the stupidity of nations, buoyed by a flawless arrangement running from the rhythm section right through to the keyboards in the background. Another classic-to-be is the poignant "Prospettiva Nevski", inspired by the Saint Petersburg street of the same name, on an album that also pays tribute to two other fascinating cities in the lyrical comparison "Venezia-Istanbul".

Although he had already abandoned pure experimentation a couple of years earlier, it was only in 1982 that Battiato went from being an underground musician to a full-blown pop star, with the album La Voce del padrone (1981). Seven songs that are practically perfect and intelligent and, no small feat, catchy and even danceable.

Musically the album presents itself as "pop", but updated with splashes of everything the music scene of the previous years had produced, from punk to electronics, from new wave to the "classical"-leaning touches largely owed to his close collaboration with maestro Giusto Pio, who co-wrote the music alongside Battiato himself.

The lyrics are a brilliant pastiche of literature, music, advertising, politics, philosophy, religion—and we can never be quite sure how much is pure nonsense and how much is shrewd juxtaposition. What's certain is that Battiato isn't afraid to mix high and low citation: from Adorno's "Minima Moralia" (which in "Bandiera bianca" becomes "Immoralia") to Alan Sorrenti's "Figli delle stelle", from "Cantami o diva" to Nicola di Bari's "Il mondo è grigio/ il mondo è blu".

The social critique is merciless, and some of the lyrics, read today, clearsightedly and strikingly anticipate the 1980s—the so-called years of the "riflusso" (retreat), with their careerism, the crisis of ideologies and the scramble for money and wellbeing ("Siamo figli delle stelle/ pronipoti di sua maestà il denaro"): after all, the waving of the white flag in the song of the same name (itself a quotation, from Arnaldo Fusinato's 1849 "Ode a Venezia") is nothing other than a sign of the songwriter's surrender to society, something akin to the metaphor of the return of the "white boar" from a couple of albums earlier.

There's also no shortage of social commentary, albeit veiled in irony ("quei programmi demenziali/ con tribune elettorali", "Quante squallide figure che attraversano il paese/ Com'è misera la vita degli abusi di potere"), along with jabs—again more sarcastic than heartfelt—aimed at music itself ("A Beethoven e Sinatra preferisco l'insalata/ A Vivaldi l'uva passa che mi dà più calorie", "e sommersi soprattutto da immondizie musicali", "Non sopporto i cori russi la musica finto rock la new wave italiana il free jazz punk inglese/ neanche la nera africana").

It's thanks to this mix that Battiato climbed the charts while also winning over the critics—although the album, besides its three most famous and still-unforgettable tracks ("Bandiera bianca", "Cuccurucucù" and "Cerco un centro di gravità permanente"), also features more refined, less playful songs, such as "Gli uccelli", an elegant and poetic description of flight, "Segnali di vita", a reflection on time and space that anticipates much of the Battiato to come, and "Sentimiento nuevo", an atypical piece in his catalogue, essentially a hymn to physical love, albeit scattered with classical references.

Things would go better afterward (for instance with Caffè De La Paix and L'imboscata), though with records that were more cerebral and appealed more to critics than to the public: La Voce del padrone remains an almost unique case, in Italian discography, of an album that managed to win everyone over.

More than pop that aspires to be learned, the music of the "Cinghiale/Patriots/Padrone" trilogy resembles learned music perfectly disguised as pop fluff. Battiato won his greatest challenge outright: making "deliberately" highly commercial music without losing the cultural dignity of his work—if anything, strengthening it. In this sense, La Voce del padrone can indeed be considered the Sicilian composer's most successful experiment, an almost inimitable achievement. It's no coincidence that in the works that followed he produced his best work only when he sought rather different paths.

Indeed, the works that immediately followed, which tried to preserve part of the formula, delivered more middling results. L'Arca di Noè (1982) is a sort of brief, pessimistic—at times apocalyptic—concept album, where the easy melodies persist, but the varied arrangements of the previous record are replaced by a sonic uniformity leaning toward a rhythmic yet subdued electronic sound.

"Radio Varsavia", "L'Esodo", "New Frontiers" and above all "Voglio Vederti Danzare" represent the high points of an album that isn't especially brilliant, but is at least pleasant.

"La Stagione dell'Amore", on the other hand, is the song that brought success to the album Orizzonti Perduti (1983), perhaps more in the "singer-songwriter" vein and, despite its intellectual invective, more commercial. The merits of this period in Battiato's career are probably to be found only in his introduction of computers and emerging technology into the making of mass-consumption songs, in his opposition to the musical dominance of the Anglo-Saxon market, as well as in a handful of other quirkier touches, such as the use of a madrigal choir in a pop setting (see, for example, La Voce del padrone and L'Arca di Noè).

The genre's strengths and, above all, its limitations return for good on Mondi Lontanissimi (1985). Suspended between sci-fi flourishes ("No Time No Space", "Via Lattea"), intimate moments ("L'Animale"), singer-songwriter pieces ("Risveglio di Primavera", "I Treni di Tozeur"), electro-pop ("Chanson Egocentrique") and the like, Battiato churns out an album of songs that slip effortlessly into listeners' ears, even those who don't grasp the ever-lofty cultural digressions.

Meanwhile, with the Spanish-language albums Ecos De Danza Sufies (1985) and Nomadas (1987), Battiato begins to build a following in South America and the Iberian peninsula too (so much so that in the Nineties he'll be compelled to re-record much of his catalogue in Castilian), while the English-language counterpart Echoes Of Sufi Dances (1985) will meet with less success.

Maestro Stockhausen had pointed out to him a few years earlier that he couldn't go on being a singer past the age of 40. It's no coincidence that at exactly that age Battiato launches a parallel career as a classical composer (not that he wasn't already one as a pop artist — the difference is that now he sometimes tries to escape the song format altogether). The occasion that inaugurates this path is the original three-act classical opera Genesi (1986), in reality largely built on synthetic and electronic textures.

The return to song is now anything but commercial: Fisiognomica (1988) opens a series of records by the Sicilian singer-songwriter shaped by classical music and sustained by a growing desire for spirituality, to the point that in the early Nineties the musician will evolve into a singer-songwriter-philosopher at odds with mass approval. The album is full of notable moments (such as the ballads "E Ti Vengo A Cercare" and "Secondo Imbrunire", which fuse love song and existential-philosophical themes, or the vividly colourful arrangement of "Il Mito Dell'Amore", which starts from keyboard sequences before plunging into piano passages, powerful operatic choruses and a finale with electric guitar solo and church organ), but the peak is the closing track "Oceano Di Silenzio", which blends keyboards and orchestra in an extremely calm, hypnotic flow, already foreshadowing the magical sonorities of the following album Come Un Cammello In Una Grondaia. Before that, though, two other releases deserve mention: the double live album Giubbe Rosse (1989), which seems to definitively close the author's commercial period, and Benvenuto Cellini – Una Vita Scellerata (1990), a thoroughly forgettable soundtrack for an Italian TV film of that year.

Come un cammello in una grondaia (1991), recorded at Abbey Road, is something of a stylistic revolution. Having abandoned the variety of music and lyrics that had made him famous, Battiato now gives voice to his own religiosity and his relentless intellectual yearning in a simple, elegiac manner. The result, though, is a difficult album, where the vocals are accompanied by the melancholy of the piano, as well as by rare, barely perceptible keyboard chords that merge into the continuous, hypnotic flow of the London Symphony Orchestra. There are four classical lieder (Wagner, Martin, Brahms, Beethoven) that barely serve to pad things out, alongside an equal number of new songs by the singer-songwriter. On "Povera Patria" and the title track, the calm of the music sits in stark contrast with the strikingly explicit political and social invective expressed. The most noteworthy pieces, however, are the two sublime mystical and religious songs: the meditation of "Le sacre sinfonie del tempo" and the prayer addressed directly to God in "L'ombra della luce".

Alternating cultured songs with more classical works, Battiato arrives at his second esoteric opera, Gilgamesh (1992), less electronically filtered than the previous "Genesi", but certainly rather pretentious.

After the now-historic "Baghdad concert" with the Iraqi National Orchestra (broadcast worldwide and still available on VHS), the artist returns to Italy once again surprising everyone with one of the finest works of his career: Caffè De La Paix (1993), which brilliantly revives the innovations of 1980s pop Battiato, filtering them, however, through the whirlwind of mysticism that grips him during this period. Drums, bass, guitars, keyboards and computers, now fully reintegrated, intersect with classical instruments and at times even traditional Arabic ones, forming an extraordinary example of world music in song format. The now-familiar, almost arrhythmic keyboard-and-orchestra expansions with mystical lyrics ("Sui Giardini Della Preesistenza", "Ricerca Sul Terzo", "Haiku") are interspersed with a series of highly effective ballads, variously arranged, poised between tradition and modernity.

Alongside the classic Arabic "Fogh in Nakhal", there's the colourful "Caffè De La Paix", which deals with reincarnation (a genuine belief of the singer-songwriter), and the renewed religious fervour of "Lode All'Inviolato", with its urgent, driving pace.

The record's masterpieces, however, are the almost grandiloquent "Atlantide", buoyed by driving rhythms and surges of electronics, and the seemingly more subdued "Delenda Carthago".

The following year brought the fairly inconsequential live album Unprotected (1994), whose mediocrity is redeemed only by the excellent choice of tracklist, and the new classical work Messa Arcaica (1994), a religious composition for soloists, choir and orchestra, taken on tour through churches (not only Catholic ones) across Italy, and met with no small success. That same year, on the occasion of yet another opera, "Il Cavaliere dell'Intelletto" (never released), began his collaboration with the elderly Sicilian philosopher Manlio Sgalambro, who from that point on would write almost all of Battiato's lyrics. Thus begins a new, eclectic phase for the Sicilian singer-songwriter, full of genuine "leaps of fancy" in terms of the genres he takes on.

This bizarre collaboration begins almost by chance with the album L'ombrello e la macchina da cucire (1995). In it, Sgalambro's philosophically feverish lyrics — which in composing revisit the intellectual stylistic devices long tested by Battiato, at times even more emphatically — combine with the musician's extremely heavy-handed atmospheres, resulting in a uniformly tedious record. The best tracks are nonetheless the apocalyptic "Piccolo pub", "Breve invito a rinviare il suicidio" and the title track. By contrast, the electronic drive of "Tao" comes as a surprise, as does the poetic, lofty way of describing sexual desire in "Fornicazione".

Having moved to Polygram after 16 years at EMI, Battiato picks up the electric guitar again and uses it as the foundation for the album that definitively restores both critical and popular support: L'Imboscata (1996) crosses Battiato's finest tradition as an intellectual singer-songwriter with the use of electric guitars. Sgalambro's contribution is also notable, with lyrics in elevated Italian that nonetheless flirt with multilingualism (English, French, Portuguese, German...). That said, most of the songs barely serve as a backdrop to the handful of genuinely successful tracks. "Di passaggio" is a reflection on Heraclitus's "panta rhei", stretched over long electric guitar riffs.

"La cura", another of his great commercial hits, is a wonderful, lofty declaration of love suspended between intellectual utopia and the search for one's own essence; it's also the best-orchestrated track on the record. The rock sound of "Strani giorni" combines the jagged guitar runs of Battiato and David Rhodes (previously in the service of Peter Gabriel) with two distinct vocal lines, one in Italian, the other in English. For the rest, there are only sophisticated ballads, albeit with the odd, slightly more original flourish (such as the shifting pace of "Serial Killer" and the piano and vocal digressions in "Ein Tag Aus Dem Leben Des Kleinen Johannes").

Meanwhile Battiato continues his exploration of electric guitars and, embracing their harsher side, shapes another remarkable album, Gommalacca (1998), which stands as one of his biggest commercial successes, yet paradoxically also one of his boldest experiments.

Rich in hard-edged sounds built around the grandiloquence of the electric guitar, electronic contamination, distortion and overdubs, yet still confined within the thoroughly conventional bounds of the song format, Battiato coins a sort of "intellectual techno hard-rock", certainly striking in impact, if perhaps slightly mannered. Taken as a whole, the record isn't uniformly strong, and several tracks could have been dropped entirely (perhaps in favour of the three good unreleased songs included on that same year's single "Il Ballo Del Potere"). But taken individually, a number of compositions are impressive in more than one respect. For instance, the "metal"-tinged reflection of "Il mantello e la spiga", or the seemingly gentle "Casta Diva", in which electric guitar "high notes" accompany Maria Callas's sampled high notes, not to mention "Auto Da Fe'", built around the interplay between that same electric guitar and the synthesizer.

The real gems of the album, though, are “Il Ballo del potere” and “Shock In My Town”. The first combines tribal-leaning percussion with striking sampled choirs, hidden melodies, and more intense evocation than usual, all wrapped in an atmosphere somewhere between futuristic and slightly overblown. The other is instead the ultimate showcase of the Italian singer-songwriter's enormous arrangement skills: over a background guitar riff, an avalanche of sounds and distortions piles up, from orchestra to spectral choirs, from a superb bassline to electronic touches; the lyrics, meanwhile, are a genuine “mescaline trip”, full of dark visions and cascading imagery; it's Battiato's nerve-racking yet refined urban chaos, distilled into the distorted false rhyme that runs through and periodically jolts the whole track: “shock in my town… Velvet Underground”.

Proof of the range of styles the artist — now in his fifties — can tackle with ease comes in the shift from the synths and electric guitars of Gommalacca to the sole piano and string quartet accompanying him on Fleurs (1999), a refined “concept cover album” made up (alongside two new tracks) of ten other people's love songs, mostly dating from the 50s and 60s, arranged for a chamber ensemble. This curious record is therefore musically very cohesive, even though it brings together songs that aren't always closely related, such as the classic “Era de maggio” by Neapolitan poet Salvatore Di Giacomo and “Ruby Tuesday” by the Rolling Stones (in fact, Battiato's aim seems to be precisely to reveal the hidden affinities between such songs).

For the most part, though, it's a tribute to a couple of Italian songwriters of the past (the recently deceased Fabrizio De André and Sergio Endrigo) and to some French counterparts (Charles Aznavour, Jacques Brel etc.).

But the surprises don't seem to end there, since with another twist Battiato once again abandons the song format and, commissioned by the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, records for Sony the seven experimental movements that make up the uncompromising Campi Magnetici (2000). It's a momentary return to the avant-garde tendencies of the early 70s, now filtered through 25 years of musical wanderings and the use of modern analogue technology. At a time of great popular success, Battiato quietly produces his most unlistenable work. Within it are constant electronic flows, frenzied sampling, hundreds of notes “fired off” in a matter of seconds, sudden percussive attacks, languid lyrical and pianistic passages, spoken-word sections dealing with science, hidden melodies, and so on, in a clash between “primordial sounds” and the patterns of a bizarre but deadly serious computerized music.

In any case, the best of the seven movements is “The Age Of Ermafrodites”, the one that most clearly highlights the contrast between hints of catchiness and sheer unlistenable music. The album, in the end, is simply an example of the artist's eclecticism rather than a full new embrace of the avant-garde, since the releases that immediately followed lean far more toward conventional pop songwriting.

Ferro Battuto (2001), featuring Natacha Atlas as a guest on a couple of tracks and Jim Kerr of Simple Minds on backing vocals on the opening track, seems to touch on several ideas without properly developing any of them, making it rather disappointing. There's the usual elevated pop (“Bist Du Bei Mir” and “Il Cammino Interminabile” the most palatable), the usual intimate reflections (“La Quiete Dopo Un Addio” or “Lontananze D'Azzurro”, drawn from a poem by Schopenhauer) and a few “musical jokes”, like the slowed-down cover of “Hey Joe” (a tribute, however, to Jimi Hendrix rather than to the song itself) or the jazzy atmospheres of “Scherzo In Minore” and the electronic textures of the long ghost track.

Fleurs 3 (2002) is the uninspired sequel to its namesake from three years earlier (an odd, “forced trilogy”, since a second chapter was never actually planned). Compared to that album, the new one is deliberately less refined, both in its choice of love songs (mostly Italian pop of past decades by artists like Sorrenti, Lauzi, Paoli and Adamo, revisited with the usual intellectual flair) and in its arrangements (the string quartet is now joined by a rhythm section and electronics, in an overall more commercial setting).

In 2003 Franco Battiato also made his film debut, directing “Perduto Amor”.

A year later came his new album, Ten Stratagems, a concise, no-frills record that also carries, between the lines, a streak of caustic anger toward international current affairs.

Opening the album is the single “Tra sesso e castità”, a song with which Battiato seems to reflect on time gone by and the approach of old age, but above all a superbly arranged, elegant and refined song. Other tracks are just as strong, like “Conforto alla Vita”, a piece resting on a bed of strings and electronics, and “Apparenze e Realtà” (a collaboration with Maurizio Arcieri, the mastermind behind the legendary Krisma), which could be the song that young, “cool” bands like Subsonica have always tried to make. And what about the magical “Fortezza Bastiani”, which recalls David Sylvian's “Secrets Of The Beehive”… The high point of the album, though, is “Le Aquile non volano a stormi”, a poetic and enchanting track steeped in Eastern allure (the lyrics are drawn from verses by the Chinese poet Qu Yuan).

But, as mentioned, the defining trait of this record is above all a current of thinly veiled tension and underlying restlessness, which first surfaces in a track like “Ermeneutica” (“eiacula precocemente l’impero/ tornano i vecchi testamenti/ gli stati mostri si avventano sui regimi fascisti”… “monstrous creature, its name is fanaticism”… “the vassal states bow to that monkey of a president… they invent democracies…”), which incidentally stands out as one of the wildest, most disorienting compositions of his career, and then in the visionary fantasy of “23 coppie di cromosomi”, a genuine urban nightmare reminiscent of the “hallucinations” of “Shock In My Town”.

Assisted on several tracks by the voice of the talented — and beautiful — Cristina Scabbia (singer of the goth-metal band Lacuna Coil) and with lyrics written, as usual, in collaboration with Manlio Sgalambro, Battiato appears in great form, feverishly eager to express his view of things. A vision that finds its most lyrical expression in the closing “La porta dello spavento supremo”, a subdued dirge for piano and strings (all strictly “synth”), with Battiato and Sgalambro trading off as the spoken voice of brief, gently fatalistic verses.

A breath to the heart of electric nature (2005) is a negligible cd+dvd, containing the recording of a concert Battiato gave at the “Nelson Mandela Forum” in Florence on 17 February 2005, as part of the “X Stratagemmi tour”.

Having now reached his twenty-ninth album, in 2007 Battiato released Il vuoto. The Battiato you'd expect, one might say. The pathologies of everyday life are dissected down to the most intimate corners of the spirit. A sick spirit, groping through the folds of emptiness, seeking precarious comfort in boundless consumption and transcendental exhaustion. Those who rejected his recent electro-pop drift will find, at least partly, their expectations of an old-style Battiato met (sure, but which old style?). And stopping at the title single would truly be a crime. Following in the footsteps of “Tra sesso e castità”, the opening track — let's admit it, it can come across as gaudy and trite — travels down roads of pop skilfully blended with electronics. The synths play off the classical austerity of the vocals, creating an echo of the underrated “Gommalacca”. And if you were genuinely put off by the single, as the writer of this review was, take refuge in the lyricism of “Tiepido Aprile”.

The majestic pastoral track that unfolds amid the strings of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra ideally carries the listener into the world of Come un cammello in una grondaia. And echoes of the Battiato of the nineteenth-century lieder period always seem to be lurking just around the corner. Just listen to the admittedly flat “Era l'inizio Della Primavera” to realize as much.

But, as we know, the Sicilian is a versatile and histrionic artist. Hence the funk-pop, seasoned with an oriental electro-noise flavour of Bluvertigo-esque flair, in “The Game Is Over”, or the nostalgic trumpets of “Aspettando l'Estate”. That the noble father of Italian song has winked at Eastern philosophies and religions is certainly no secret. And “Niente è come sembra”, inspired by a saying of the Buddha and a programmatic text of Battiato-thought, though decidedly monotone in its melodic development, bears out the thesis of the artist-philosopher, aided not by chance by the now ever-faithful Manlio Sgalambro. The world-music of the closing “Stati di Gioia” ideally brings things full circle.

Il vuoto is an album that knows how to comfort, one that shouldn't be asked for anything more than what it sets out to offer: it aims to teach a lesson more than to be musically admired. "My drug is a clear sky with a cloud crossing it. For some it will be boring, for me it's like shooting heroin." That's the essence of “Il vuoto”, straight from Battiato's own words. How can you argue with that?

Nine years after the first experiment, Fleurs, and seven after its successor, Fleurs 3, Battiato revives a formula that had achieved decent success but that, beyond the elegance of the compositions, betrayed an underlying fatigue.

Just as back then, on Fleurs 2, the songwriter from Ionia devotes himself to reinterpreting songs of the past, running through twelve tracks both Italian and foreign, aided by guests of considerable prestige. So we move from the slightly stiff English of “It's Five O' Clock” (an Aphrodite's Child track) to the enveloping strings of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (by Simon & Garfunkel). Among the most successful episodes are the seventh track, “Il venait d'avoir 18 ans” with Dalida in great form, the prestigious collaboration with Antony (“Of His Swift Flight”), and the inspired, nervy pop-noise-jazz of “La musica muore”.

An album that feels rather pointless, an end in itself, unable either to strike a chord musically or to capture any real emotion.

After reworking his own art on Inneres Auge – The whole is more than the sum of its parts and the titanic opera “Telesio”, the composer from Catania finally returns to the studio for a new album of original material. Open Sesame (2012) presents us with a Battiato torn between the condition of a citizen outraged by political abuse and economic injustice on one hand, and that of an artist reaching for new moral equilibria on the other. If matter is corrupt, the Catania-born composer seems to suggest, spirituality is the chosen refuge, or the place from which to set out again in the process of improving the world. It's as if Battiato, having metabolised it, managed to drag the visceral rage of “Inneres Auge” up to a more sublime level, ennobling it through the lyrics of the first single “Passacaglia” (“we live in a horrible world”, and again “people are cruel and often unfaithful, no one is ashamed to tell a lie”), co-written with his trusty collaborator Manlio Sgalambro and inspired by the classical composition “Passacaglia della vita” by the seventeenth-century priest Stefano Landi; and then in the metaphor of “Il serpente”, a representation of money that “crept through the cities of the West” before the arrival of the “new man” who, suddenly “discovering the existence of white”, will set things right.

Musically, the album doesn't differ substantially from either Ten Stratagems or Il Vuoto. The pop sound doesn't forgo electronic exploration, a pairing that fits perfectly into the backdrop of "La polvere del branco" and the magical touches of the visionary title track "Open Sesame". The electric guitar is absent, no song runs beyond four minutes, and there's a noticeable return to lyrical, classically-tinged flourishes: the heartfelt piano accompanying "Il Serpente" points straight back to "Povera patria".

Open Sesame throws its doors wide open both to the unease of contemporary life and to the search for the sublime, filling everything with learned, and as usual polyglot, references. In "Caliti Junku", Battiato ranges from Latin to Sicilian dialect ("Caliti juncu, chi passa la china", meaning "wait for the flood to pass, your moment will come") to English, from ancient arias to pop blended with classical music. The otherworldly elegance of "Un irresistibile richiamo" recalls Saint Teresa of Ávila ("I greet you, divinity of my land" — addressed to Giuni Russo?), the twenty-sixth canto of Dante's Inferno and the Gospel appear in "Testamento", the Arab poet Ibn Hamdis — already encountered in the theatrical piece "Diwan" — in "Aurora", Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade in "Open Sesame", and the aforementioned Stefano Landi in "Passacaglia", an introspective look back over an entire lifetime. A backward glance that turns pop in the memories of "Quand'ero giovane", an age the Sicilian artist doesn't seem to miss all that much.

In 2013 Battiato met Antony Hegarty, sharing a concert with him at the Verona Arena from which the double live album Of His Swift Flight was drawn, featuring contributions from the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini conducted by Rob Moose.

After Open Sesame, Battiato's artistic rejuvenation takes new shape in a definitive leap into the past — total from an "ideological" standpoint, and only half so from a strictly musical one. The project Joe Patti's Experimental Group (2014), made with sound engineer Pino "Pinaxa" Pischetola — at Battiato's side since the cult classic Gommalacca — is, by intent, a return to the free form of 1970s Italian music, a period when Franco the icon came across as an unusually chic rebel, bold in his experimentation and blasphemous in his subject matter. It's an album that explains itself, with few words (none of them new) and plenty of lysergic atmospheric music, with detours of kosmische and ambient-techno lineage. Fragments of past lyrics echo through the tracks (from "New Frontiers" to "Inneres Auge" and "Shakleton"), decontextualised snippets that, depending on one's point of view, can seem like meaning-laden evocations or simply dried-out scraps of poetic memory.

The duo's blend heads in multiple directions — from sacred echoes reminiscent of the Messa Arcaica ("CERN") to Stockhausen-like collages with an oriental flavour — though never truly surprising, especially in light of their most recent studio exploits. That said, there's no denying the gratifying dreaminess of moments like "Klavier" and "The Implicate Order", worthy of the angelic visions of the Eno/Budd pairing, or the solemn "Omaggio a Giordano Bruno", in pure Popol Vuh style. Pinaxa's architectural contribution is perceptible throughout, putting his experience to full use in placing every sonic detail just right and giving it the proper weight within the whole.

Joe Patti's suggestions will almost certainly produce a far more striking effect live, but on record they give the album the feel of a somewhat disorderly sampler. Still, it has the undeniable merit of reclaiming the idea of music as a necessary escape from a suffocating reality, skilfully reworking its postmodern traits without ever succumbing to them.

Beyond the strong social critique, then, Battiato still doesn't shy away from venturing further into the realm of the intellect, touching on different philosophies, religions, arts and literatures. This is the greatness of being human, expressed in every form, refusing to bow to the storms of our times.

But sadly, Franco Battiato's "cycle of lives" was drawing rapidly to a close.

Ill for some time (probably with Alzheimer's, though the illness was never officially confirmed), he effectively withdrew from the music and art scene starting in 2017, when a domestic accident forced him to stop performing concerts and touring. He took refuge in his villa on the slopes of Etna, surrounded by the affection of his family.

After the release of the unreleased track “Torneremo ancora” (2019), accompanied by a chilling announcement from his staff – “This will be his last song, we have no more of his material” – the shadow of illness fell inexorably over Battiato's life, and he passed away on 18 May 2021 at his home in Milo. He left behind an immeasurable legacy and a huge void in the Italian music scene he had so profoundly innovated and transformed through his work.

Contributions by Davide Bassi (“La Voce Del Padrone”), Mauro Roma (“Ten Stratagems”), Alberto Asquini (“Il Vuoto”, “Fleurs 2”), Fabio Guastalla (“Open Sesame”), Michele Palozzo (“Joe Patti's Experimental Group”)

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