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Raise your hand if you've never thought about varying the Goldberg Variations in a myriad of ways (silence, wind, tumbleweed crossing the room). I have. I thought about doing it in the '90s, when I was recording the mass sound of the refrigerator.
But at nineteen, you experience things in a certain way: somewhere between the perspective of a strange, poor, and misunderstood musician and the alternative of the club guy, like some movie title by Nino D'Angelo. Balance is a kind of chimera; the imbalance is the certainty that chimera is a good word for an aria sung by Mario del Monaco.
I don't think it's necessary to write much about the Goldberg Variations, the mathematical intrigues chasing each other in a sort of divine astrophysics, where numbers and God align, forming circles, combinations, brilliant conjuring tricks. Or the more or less verified story of the sleepless Count who, instead of taking valerian, had music commissioned to help him sleep, or the more recent rumor that they were written by his wife.
Genre literature has been talking about it since, a few centuries ago, it was resurrected from dust, becoming an icon, a divine composer, the one from The World of Quark.
And I wouldn't dwell on Bach either: genius as he may be, his story annoys me; his battles on the organ, spying on Buxtehude, those "samples" snatched from the secular repertoire (especially Italian). And then this "well-tempered" genius, obsessively precise, perfect. Too perfect. Obsessively perfect. I prefer to imagine him having fun, repopulating half of Saxony.
My project on the Variations was imagined as a gradual disintegrating process, starting with the clean sound of the Aria and arriving at the completely shattered "da capo" Aria. I wasn't convinced by ending shattered and starting again clean. I didn't close the circle. Then I thought I wasn't Alvin Lucier and that one day, William Basinski would disintegrate better, and I remember my 19 years at romaparioline parties to the notes of "Please don't go" with the girls from Non è la Rai.
Claudio Rocchetti, a few years ago, boldly tackled the Goldberg Variations.
Rocchetti is a diamond point of the Italian lofamostran genre whose collaborations range from Valerio Tricoli to Jukka Reverberi; a cornerstone of a path that had a beginning, a follow-up, but we all wonder exactly what end it will reach.
But we don't care much about chimeras and focus on this interesting compendium of feedback and distorted analogies, where all the obsessively detailed scripts, the relationships, and the consequences of J.S. Bach's measures are literally gone to seek blessing; the variations are cut and become almost a playful excuse to play around, creating mash-ups and sound collages from the old school.
The aspect I appreciate about Rocchetti compared to some of his contemporaries is that he seems to have come out of "Ethika fon Ethica" by Franco Battiato, when in the '70s he was turning analog knobs and dodging chairs thrown by the few attendees.
If everyone knows where Battiato was heading shortly after, in Rocchetti's case, the poor "pop" attitude and the – forgive me – aesthetic and cognitive uncertainty keep him in a limbo, so to speak, "uncertain" and at times unaware of what and how he is doing. Probably, to make the "step forward," the search for sound, audiocassettes, tangles of cables and knobs is not enough, but the awareness of what is being touched, that "who benefits" wouldn't go amiss.
And then I stopped saying "good guys in perspective" because these are all fifty-year-olds with sciatica. But this doesn't preclude me from thinking of buying the vinyl, because aside from the considerations, listening to this work transported me into an apocalyptic scenario where, among the ruins of a nuclear holocaust, you hear from afar, suffocated and in agony, the sound of broken variations.
And that chimera arrived as it couldn't have arrived worse.
Rocchetti's Goldberg Variations can be listened to and/or purchased here:
https://kohlhaas.bandcamp.com/album/claudio-rocchetti-goldberg-variations
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