Franco Battiato

In 1973, Franco Battiato is at a turning point. After two albums of experimental rock that, thanks to manager Gianni Sassi's Situationist-style promotional stunts, had made him a name both feared and revered on the Italian music scene, the 28-year-old from Ionia feels the need to shuffle the deck and win full creative independence.

He ditches his cumbersome mentor (who would soon bounce back by launching the career of Area), temporarily leaves behind Milan, where he had moved years earlier as a young man seeking his fortune, and sets off. Two destinations: New York and Sicily.

More than searching for new inspiration, Battiato wants to dig deeper into the intuitions that led him to the break. The Big Apple and his native land are indeed the essential points of reference for the musical vision he wants to steer his immediate future toward: a thoroughly personal fusion of electronic minimalism and traditional echoes.

"Sulle corde di Aries" was released by Bla Bla in December 1973. On the cover, Franco Battiato's face appears doubled, staring straight ahead. It's the most reflective and forward-looking album he had put out up to that point. The record's structure is typical for the era: on side one, a single long composition; on side two, three shorter tracks. Let's allow ourselves a small liberty and start from the latter. We'll come back later to what Battiato found on his travels.

The first track we encounter is the (near) title track, "Aries". Aries is the musician's zodiac sign, born March 23, 1945, and is traditionally associated with rebirth: the symbolic intent is plain to see.

If the very first dissonant moments might suggest a return to the avant-garde, late-psychedelic aesthetic of his previous works, after the first thirty seconds it's already clear the horizon is different. Noise and jagged edges pave the way for the emergence of a recurring synthesizer theme, which in turn opens onto a clearing of guitar, delay, percussion and vocal elements. A dreamlike atmosphere onto which free, zigzagging saxophone phrases are slowly grafted.

This is essentially an instrumental piece, an “interlude” one might call it, though it lends itself well to introducing the album's many recurring elements. Instrumentation and personnel, first of all: Battiato abandons the “rock” setup of his previous albums, keeping on board only two of the musicians who had accompanied him before, drummer Gianfranco D'Adda and guitarist Gianni Mocchetti. The two are nonetheless frequently asked to set aside their instruments of choice in favor of tones closer to folk music: the mandola for Mocchetti and the tabla and other percussion for Mocchetti. Producer Pino Massara also remains, and will stay with the artist right up to the “pop turn” of “L'era del cinghiale bianco” (1979). Alongside his seasoned collaborators, the artist brings in numerous guests: the standout on “Aries” is saxophonist Gianni Bedori, a close collaborator of Giorgio Gaslini and responsible, with his closing digressions on “Aries”, for one of the very few explicitly jazz-inflected episodes in Battiato's career.

For himself, however, Battiato reserves the use of his favorite jewel: the VCS3 synthesizer, an instrument he had pioneered since the days of “Fetus”. Manufactured by the British company EMS (Electronic Music Studios), it was the first portable synthesizer to hit the market: a suitcase of wonders that debuted at just £330 in 1969, almost a year before — and, crucially, at less than a quarter of the price of — the far more famous Minimoog. Highly versatile but far less intuitive to operate than its rock-history-altering rival, the VCS3 was beloved by musicians most inclined toward experimentation for its ability to generate alien, magmatic sounds. The long, exhausting sessions spent tinkering with the idiosyncratic pin pad that governed its modular control became, in the early Seventies, a recurring pursuit for artists such as Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, King Crimson, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre… And for Franco Battiato, who would later recall: “I'd spend whole nights with it, in the dark, just me and the VCS3. Hours and hours coaxing sounds out of the machine, hours and hours fiddling with filters and oscillators. It was a journey, a mystical experience […]. That thing saved my life” (the interview excerpt is taken from “Superonda: the secret history of Italian music” by Valerio Mattioli, published by Arcana in 2016 — an essential book for anyone who loves Italy's Seventies, and not only musically).

“Aria di rivoluzione” is another story altogether. The first pop song in Battiato's authorial output, it is a pop track. Actually, that's not quite true: back in the Sixties the musician had already tried his hand at chart success with a handful of “pop ditties”, which he himself promptly disowned. That aside, “Aria di rivoluzione” can barely be called a “song” at all: it's an effects-laden sermon combined with a poem in German, gurgling ambient guitar and a long coda somewhere between free jazz and folk. And yet calling it a “pop song” isn't entirely a lie: the track does have something none of the tracks on “Fetus” and “Pollution” had. It boasts an iconic melody without ever tipping into the ridiculous: its chant-like cadence, which the collective imagination will come to associate with the muezzin's call to prayer, is a world away from the hippie-ish refrains that occasionally interrupted the experimentalism of his earlier records, and it already fully displays the traits that will make the structures of his future “pop ditties” so unmistakable. It also has an effective, evocative lyric: oblique and improbable, yes, but never gratuitously provocative. With its exotic references and its attention to fleeting moments and gestures that translate otherwise elusive states of mind, it is in fact an early example of that “Battiato style” that would bring the artist success starting in the Eighties.

Reading it as a preamble to what's to come, however, doesn't change the fact that “Aria di rivoluzione” is, above all, a deeply moving piece. Its suspended, enigmatic atmosphere lets its five minutes soar thanks to an admirable interplay of opposites: the languid arrangement against the hieratic verse, the gradual blossoming of the instrumental lines against the obsessive stasis of the rhythmic elements bound to the transfigured guitar backdrop. The swirling flurries of cello, alto sax and clarinet, courtesy of musicians Jane Robertson and Daniele Cavallanti, recall the sound of experimental folk acts like Popol Vuh, Third Ear Band and Aktuala (in which Cavallanti himself played), clashing with the aura of inevitability that seeps through the words written and declaimed by Battiato. Inspired by his father's experiences as a haulage driver in fascist-era Ethiopia, the two spare verses that make up the song echo distant memories of war and unspoken resistance, before veering, in a leap of association, into a stark disillusionment with the youth movements of the era (“This generation of mine/ wants new values/ and I've already heard/ a whiff of revolution/ I've already heard the cries/ of those who'll face the firing squad”).

The German-language piece “Genossen, wer von uns wäre nicht gegen den Krieg?”, by Marxist poet and singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann (b. 1936), strikes an altogether different tone. Biermann moved in 1956 to what was then the GDR and later became one of its harshest critics. Wanting to include a spoken section in German in the track, Battiato got in touch with Jutta Niehaus, singer of the Italian-German group Analogy, who suggested the lied found in the 1968 collection “Mit Marx- und Engelszungen. Gedichte, Balladen, Lieder”:

Compagni, chi di noi non sarebbe contro la guerra?

(Traduzione tratta dal sito “Songs Against War”)

However, the splendor of Müntzer's morning stars

sopra i contadini in rivolta,

quando tingevano la testa dei loro aguzzini con una luce insanguinata.

Però, la melodia del Katiuscia

quando, a Natale, urlava “Pace sulla terra”

nelle orecchie gelate dei soldati di Hitler.

Però, l'eleganza dei missili automatici

in the skies over Ho-Chi-Minh

when they give that extraordinary kiss

to the extraordinary mechanical performance of the engineers of Detroit.

But the beauty of the machine gun

slung over the guerrilla's shoulder

when it gives the Bolivian porter solid arguments

against his oppressors, which they finally understand.

But, what's even better: police trained against the people,

when they're about to drown, tossed into the river of the enraged masses,

and in the end, in the end, instead of their weapons

they clasp the saving hand of the unarmed

“Oriente e occidente” is, at least in terms of inspiration, the most prog episode on the record. It's also, it seems, the first thematic seed of the album to take shape in Battiato's mind. As the musician and Battiato scholar Fabio Zuffanti reconstructs it in “Franco Battiato: tutti i dischi e tutte le canzoni, dal 1965 al 2019” (Arcana, 2020): “A humanity living inside the crater of a volcano, in particular the story of one of these [inhabitants] who wants to leave the pleasant place to seek a new life”. The scenario and the language adopted have something Homeric about them, but it's not hard to spot in the lyrics a mythological transposition of the author's own condition, eager to break away, whatever the cost, from the excessive constraints of his previous artistic phase, and to follow through on the closing line “scelgo una nuova vita” (“I choose a new life”).

Unlike the other tracks on the album, the piece is explicitly segmented into sections, which follow one another with sharp breaks. There's the introduction, built on guitar and VCS3, which creates a sense of anticipation followed by the entrance of the voice and a change of the synthesizer's patch. The latter's dazzling timbres, the echo on the vocal phrases and the solemnity of the delivery (“Riduci le stelle in polvere/ e non invecchierai/ mi appare in sogno Venere/ …”) lend the section the ritualistic aura of a prophecy, intoned before a burning fire. The change of atmosphere is therefore profound when, out of the silence, the double flashes of oboist Gaetano Galli's playing emerge, opening the way, with a vaguely Stravinsky-esque flair, to a gradual instrumental blossoming: first the mandola, then the VCS3 again (this time in a purely melodic role). A brief interlude of percussion alone, marked out with ceremonial rigor, allows all the instruments to come back in together, diverging more and more both in the registers they occupy and in their melodic themes. The influence of ecstatic minimalism on the compositional style of this coda is transparent, but equally evident is the search for an approach to repetition/evolution rooted in traditional musicality and spirituality. The two aspects combine to evoke shifting images of purification and rebirth, shadows and flickering flames, vague initiatory rites that reconnect man to the earth.

We've waited until now to mention “Sequenze e frequenze”, the track that occupies the other side of the LP, because it's here that all the elements highlighted so far converge. The synthetic research and the unusual pop drive, the skewed, intimate and imaginative lyrics, the minimalism, the space devoted to folklore. And others resurface too: the track's cacophonous opening, built on intrusions of symphonic material and abstract vocalizing from sopranos Jutta Niehaus (Analogy) and Rossella Conz, is the only moment on the record that recalls the collage-style approach found on the two albums produced by Gianni Sassi. The distorted guitar drone that emerges as the introduction fades out can also be seen as a nod to the abrasive sounds of the artistic phase just left behind.

That the wind has changed, however, is made clear by the arrival of the voice over the layers of VCS3: once again two spare verses, in the style already described for “Aria di rivoluzione”, chant-like and, in its own way, impossible to erase from memory. Here the theme is as autobiographical as it gets, placing the artist's origins doubly at the center: from a biographical point of view, reviving moods and feelings tied to childhood, and from a geographical one, linking those memories to the very fabric of the places he came from.

In summer, the teacher used to give us lessons in her courtyard

I would always sit on a low wall, watching the sea

Every so often a ship would pass by

Every so often a ship would pass by

The monodic vocal line, seemingly simple yet harmonically suspended between the Dorian and Aeolian modes, interacts with the drone beneath it, creating occasional unisons that heighten the expressiveness of certain key words: above all, mare ("sea"). On the second "nave" ("ship"), the wavering line of the VCS3 shifts into a schematic, repetitive pattern: a VII-I-III-I arpeggio that follows the verse's oscillation between major and minor, reaffirming its elusiveness.

And on winter evenings I stayed shut indoors, growing musty

Outside, the noise of the streetlamps made my candle seem smaller

In the sudden morning clear sky

Brought me a scent of earth

Here too certain words are given emphasis: mattino/ improvviso/ sereno/ portava/ profumo/ terra ("morning/ sudden/ clear sky/ brought/ scent/ earth"), with the first in particular marked by a change in tempo that – momentarily throwing off the rhythmic compass – pairs the arpeggio with the guitar's ternary pulse.

Sea, earth, breezes, scents, shifting weather, rays of light. These are the ingredients, unspoken yet more present than ever, in the nearly thirteen minutes that follow the final line. From the low wall, the gaze stretches out toward the Mediterranean extending as far as the eye can see, tracing it with the mind's eye, chasing its ripples and currents. It's an out-of-body experience, a journey into a timeless dimension where the only reference point is the steady regularity of the waves, the same in the present, the future, the past, and every possible direction. Numerous musical elements follow one another in depicting the pulse of this teeming sonic ocean: tabla, synthesizer, and, from the middle of the sixth minute, a pulsating loop of heavily effected guitar, a perfect transposition of the wave motion that will stay with the track until its close. Over this relentless base, other instruments dance like sea spray, birds, pollen carried on the wind: mandola, guitar, then (from the fifth minute) prepared piano, played back sped up to raise its pitch, and from the seventh minute onward an uncredited percussion instrument (likely a kalimba), with a particularly bright, playful sound.

"Sequenze e frequenze" is one of those rare tracks for which there seems no valid reason it should ever have to end. It could go on forever, and that would be just fine. It makes peace with the universe. Perhaps it's here, even more than in the undeniable stylistic ties, that we find the deep affinity with the music Battiato wanted to explore in New York: the new path in contemporary music developed by Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley. Of these, comparing them to the "old guard" Cage, Stockhausen, and Boulez who had previously been major touchstones for him, he would say: "For me, those were something else. They were my thing" (again, see "Superonda"). Compared to the New York composers, similarly drawn to the paradisiacal rapture induced by repetition, layering and variation, Battiato's approach nonetheless carries the concreteness and groundedness of a bond with the earth. Whether they echo the sounds of the two shores of the Sicilian Channel, or express a vague, entirely imaginary traditional horizon, the abstract saltarelli in which the instruments chase one another spark evocative potential in the music that is alien to the purest manifestations of American minimalism, and quite distinct too from the more ambient, futuristic drift that would come to define German kosmische musik in the years ahead.

Rather, it's possible to trace back to this Mediterranean path indicated here by Battiato other subsequent experiments carried out in our country: from the effervescent minimalism of Roberto Cacciapaglia (already a collaborator of Battiato's on "Pollution") and Arturo Stalteri (Pierrot Lunaire), all the way to the celestial jazz-prog-folk of the late-period Canzoniere del Lazio ("Miradas"), crossing paths with future Battiato collaborators (Lino "Capra" Vaccina, Francesco Messina) or the singular minimalist electro-folk of the largely forgotten Pepe Maina, who in 1977 and 1979 released two albums well worth rediscovering, "Il canto dell'arpa e del flauto" and "Scerizza".

"Sulle corde di Aries" is among the most celebrated albums of the progressive rock era in Italy; a movement to which – assuming it can truly be traced back to it at all – it stands as a thoroughly sui generis representative, projected as it is toward sonic territories quite removed from the usual reference points of homegrown prog. It's also a watershed moment in the artist's career, and in some sense a hub from which many of the paths that would later shape his research branch out. Already by the following "Clic" (1974), tracks like "Propietad Prohibida" would sharpen the minimalist streak thanks to the arrival of sequencers, an approach later pushed to extremes in the once again uncompromising work of the latter half of the Seventies. And yet, even the encyclopedic pop songcraft that would mark the "pop turn" already finds its seeds in the iconic verses of "Sequenze e frequenze" and "Aria di rivoluzione". And doesn't the turn toward world sounds that would dominate the early Nineties on "Caffè De La Paix" perhaps have its first embryonic point of origin in the Mediterranean echoes that animate this album?

Right around the time he began working on "Sulle corde di Aries", moreover, Battiato was discovering the meditative theories and practices of Middle Eastern and Eastern cultures – an aspect that starts to surface in the album's transcendental atmospheres and, as is well known, would become increasingly central to the artist's subsequent artistic and personal path.

Setting aside all this context, however, Franco Battiato's third album is above all a record of enormous, irrepressible intrinsic allure. Music outside of time and space, able to contain eternity within half an hour and a few minutes.

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23/05/2021