Faust'o - A Pact with Torment

1977 is a fundamental topos in rock history, the post-punk melting pot swells out of all proportion, with highly respectable releases: the Talking Heads release "77", a neurotic slice of punk-funk, Suicide ooze urban anxiety on their self-titled debut, David Bowie joins the unwritten new wave manifesto by producing the two albums that make up the Berlin trilogy: "Low" and "Heroes", later completed by "Lodger".

1978 is a testing ground, after the absorption of the many inputs received. And Italy doesn't shy away from getting swept up in the wave: on the back of iconoclastic attitudes, parodies of power, electronic experiments, frenzies clearly inspired by London, borrowed from the scorn spat in the face of rulers, traditional singer-songwriter fare is pushed to the margins, giving way to the eruption of new, extreme figures, politically incorrect and scandalous: Donatella Rettore, Alberto Camerini, Ivan Cattaneo, exponents of an utterly over-the-top aesthetic that takes shape in a blend of punk-ska-reggae; at the same time, the cultured experiments of Franco Battiato, the minimal new wave of Krisma, and the nonsensical rock of Skiantos take shape.

Amid the general ferment, an LP begins circulating in the underground scene with a cover that's almost a clone of "Heroes": in place of Bowie's Kemp-inspired mime, a less theatrical, more intimate pose, in which the artist looks straight into the eyes of the potential buyer/listener. The style is unmistakably glam, confirmed by the kohl-rimmed eyes and glossed lips, already signalling a declared ambiguity and play on the self. The album is titled Suicide and he goes by Faust'o, a pseudonym for Fausto Rossi and a further clue to his complexity.

A borderline character, irreverent, indignant and rebellious to the point of outright insolence, the Friulian artist would go on to launch almost kamikaze challenges at the entire system, unsettling common mentality, moving confidently against an ignorant and obtuse World/Giant, and striking, in an irreversible and formative way, a small but sensitive audience of listeners.

The calling card is seemingly menacing, but the subject matter/title track is handled with great disenchantment and a knack for defusing drama, with a proudly misanthropic attitude ("everything I feel around me is boredom, boredom, boredom. Even the earthquake now just bores me, bores me, bores me. Ah! Suicide! To go back down there again!").

The demolition of false idols continues in "Godi", a kind of mockery of Catholic sexual prudishness set to a burlesque piano. The settling of scores with the bourgeois family microcosm is laid out with sarcasm in "Piccolo Lord", with a slow, anguished opening that is soon torn open by the agitated drive of the drums and the distortion of the guitar, in an alternation blissfully unconcerned with any stylistic rigor.

The same lack of structure marks "Il mio sesso", a surreal piece of irony about his own genitals, between glam divertissement and wave-leaning openings, whose multifaceted identity is narrated in the falsetto of "C'è un posto caldo". Closing the record is the insolent challenge thrown at the whole system in "Benvenuti tra i rifiuti", with a pre-dark flavor in some reverbs reminiscent of the Cure.

The second act is Poco zucchero, released in 1979, steeped in grotesque atmospheres à la Devo ("Cosa rimane") and restless synth ascents that raise the curtain on romantic torments ("In tua assenza" and "Il lungo addio"); the tones turn apocalyptic and subdued, over a bed of stretched-out layers of drums, effects and catatonic guitars, leaving the sax to become the protagonist of the long closing track ("Funerale a Praga").

After a spoken word opening, in J'accuse… amore mio, the conclusion of the trilogy and the opening of the new decade, the 1980s, Faust'o continues down the wave path, drawing not exclusively on the Italian language ("Piccole anime"), raving in the manner of David Byrne's "Fear Of Music" – "Disaster" and "Michael Michael (You're Bloody Drunk)" – and turning to self-irony to address his phantom beloved Valentina ("Non mi pettino mai"). J'accuse is the album with which the artist presents himself with absolutely no shame to an audience certainly not up to the task, historically used to quite different fare and far from imagining the imminent provocation: on the Festivalbar stage he mimes "Hotel Plaza", close to a certain Roxy Music dandyism, sitting on a piano chewing an apple… he will be literally "binned", but traces of admirable, decadent surrealism will remain in the lyrics ("Hotel Plaza, amo i tuoi fiori come nevrastenie").

The next step is a surprisingly instrumental album. Out Now, from 1982, is claustrophobia in its purest form, a metallic, dark record, the accelerated heartbeat of a recurring nightmare ("Orange"), Bowie-esque passages through Berlin undergrounds ("Grey Sand And Wave"), extemporaneous, kaleidoscopic gypsy flourishes with the effect of a "spinning top gone mad" ("A Cup Of Tea"), ambient expanses holding whispered streams of consciousness ("The Sound Of My Walls"), and the chattering of horns to close it out ("Amedeo's").

The momentary silence seems to have allowed just the right amount of introspection, enough to pin down future themes and arrange them with an essential, mature touch on the following Faust'o, far removed from the furious, mad early records, an album with sharp, equally unsettling writing, but more elegant and seemingly composed. The album is deeply biographical, testimony to a soul in perpetual conflict, wrapped in a form of nihilism well expressed by the constant recurrence of fire as a metaphor for a solitary self watching from afar a world from which it keeps its due distance ("Ogni fuoco", "Stracci alle fiamme", "Ultimi fuochi"). Heartfelt warnings try to put Love on guard against danger/reality, declaiming in a Battiato-like manner over distorted guitars ("E poi non voltarti mai"); but love seems not to listen, continuing to hurt/be hurt, lost in a spiral of chilling sadomasochism ("Jeraldine"). Toward the end come the most visionary and decadent episodes: the mournful ballad with its utopian solution suggested in the chorus of "Alien" ("Alien, alien… alien is a chance, a chance that's falling, falling over and again") and the Mongolian-tinged opening/lament, anticipating the post-Oriente experiences of CSI in the 90s, of "Rip Van Winkle".

Closing out the '80s five years ahead of schedule is the album Love Story, entirely in English. Despite its sentimental, cinematic title, the writing and the sound have little that is syrupy or politically correct: the love described by Faust'o is yet another instance of unease — this time almost a celebration — drawn from the most expansive episodes of Joy Division, as the title of the opening track, "Exhibition Of Love", seems to suggest, immediately followed by the sharp, dry interplay of bass and drums in "Two Walls"; the voice makes incursions into a neural wasteland of souls weary of struggling toward a possible way back up, on one side a male vocal darker than ever, on the other a soprano fluttering nervously and aristocratically ("Overtones"). The closing track ("Big Beat") opens up to the world, but only to look at it with detachment and remain locked within its own introspection, like a paradoxical encouragement to cynicism and misanthropy, badges of consistency worn with courage and constancy.

Almost as a preparatory catharsis aimed at accepting a society in rapid evolution without being scratched by it, developing instead a critical spirit that is progressively more detached yet still pulsing, the artist devotes a full seven years to the study of techno-musicology and early music, arriving in 1992 at the production of Things Are Changing, an album that definitively turns the page on the provocations of the "Faust'o character", giving us back an identity called Fausto Rossi, more pensive and focused on melody rather than on the will to shock. The album oozes mild, autumnal sonorities, close to a certain Sakamoto-esque research ("In tuo ricordo"); the lyrics turn melancholic and poignant, an opening of a self lost and confused over the decision to make, whether to "throw oneself" into living or remain shut in the fragile shell of every wound (the beautiful "Tentazione di esistere", which reads "potrei svanire, e poi tornare, e poi svanire e poi tornare… guardare ogni tanto la luna"); the autobiographical thread is picked up again in "Per il mio compleanno", an intersecting of imperceptible lines, in its lightness, and sudden touches, resulting in something tense and hypnotic; soft world music echoes in the penultimate track, sung with new-romantic languor and steeped in regret ("Morbide macchine").

While smoothing over certain rough edges, L'erba, from 1995, built on a more traditionally rock framework, is occasionally visited by quick ethnic passages and electronic touches that amplify its pathos; it's a tough album, a fearless anamnesis of hypocritical and falsely bigoted social structures, in which one feels hemmed in yet resists, now celebrating the redemptive power of intoxicating potions (the title track, "santa l'erba che apre dolcemente il cuore"), now listing the various objects of repulsion only to relegate them to the delight of an idolizing "mass" ("la scienza, il progresso, la nuova nobiltà"); the emotional ordeal, traces of which the artist leaves on every album, begins with "Perché il mio amore", a pained questioning of transience, under the continuous, invasive breath of every lover down one's neck, and continues, with a subdued gait and a stretched-out rhythm, in "Chiudi gli occhi (la vita è un sogno)", a crudely visceral letter to a past Love, written by an I almost severed from its own bodily dimension, emptied by the absence of the old contact with the Other's flesh. Closing it out is the essential tribute to John Cale, sung with Bowie-esque glam flair, "Close Watch (John Cale)".

Peace with his own surplus of energy seems a pipe dream, a goal that Fausto's very nature can only grant him through a love/hate relationship; the 1996 live album Lost And Found still testifies to a spirit consistently tormented, yet never tired of declaring its personal vision of the world and its paradoxical humanity. This comes through eleven demo tracks which, besides revisiting historic pieces such as "Ogni fuoco", "Jeraldine", "E poi non voltarti mai" and "Alien", seem a definitive declaration of belonging to the ambiguity of the glam womb, to refined wave decadence, to the use of the voice as a strand of flexible, nervous metal — languors all magnified by the presence of a virilely courting sax.

The final act of a restlessness still vivid today and worn with ease is Exit, a kind of depressed celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Suicide. The explosions, stoked by the reckless fury of youth, dissolve into the bitterness of an identity aware that there is no real, definitive destination, as told in "Ora che ho visto". The voice becomes a cataclysmic lament, a post-disillusionment weakness, the denunciation of an alienation tempted to lay down its arms, in the rock ballad that is the title track ("fuori, fuori dal sogno per lasciare ogni cosa che non si può avere, niente pensieri assoluti e niente paura di essere e vivere"); the desolation of a spirit wounded by the hallucinatory succession of events opens the slurred narration of "Sotto la pioggia al mattino", comparable, for its guitar and at-times weary singing, to certain future solo episodes of Giorgio Canali. After the 14 minutes of pure, merciless mass sociology of "Blues" ("ma come posso distinguerli se hanno un'unica espressione? …milioni di uomini tutti insieme sono un unico animale grasso e squilibrato con pelle di alluminio senza muscoli né ossa, solo l'osso del cuore"), the closing lullaby for adults who are victims/executioners of themselves, and Don Quixotes of a world never fully accepted, "Gli occhi si chiudono".

Through his live shows, Fausto Rossi continues to proudly spew out cynical truths, personal devastations, witty paradoxes, and total insolence, in absolute keeping with the ancient pact struck with torment and in faithful respect of his premature marriage to alienation. All this before an audience of survivors of '80s wave delirium, still bound by generational ties nourished on the same torment, alongside newcomers in search of a raw, courageous depth, dispersed and obscured by the artificial light of so much imitation.

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