Demetrio Stratos
Cantare La Voce

[...] We start with this concept: that we know very little, almost nothing, about the voice... and the first track on the first side of a record that was released today, called "Singing the Voice," is called "Dipophonies, Tripophonies, Investigations" and... it's about using the ear like a microscope to extract scraps of sound or even divide scraps of sound to try to break the sound, enter into the sound, break it into two and three parts. How it works, in my opinion: the voice uh... here works as a vehicle that occasionally glances right and left, in... small chambers, and... these glances bounce like ping pong balls. These ping pong balls, which bounce with sympathy, can be controlled."
(from "Concerto All'Elfo" - 1978)

Stratos loved to talk to ordinary people about his studies and his theories on voice-music. His musical reflections led him to recover the primitive sacredness of the voice-instrument freed from language and those control mechanisms imposed by the Super-Ego, which have always wanted it tamed to the dictates of "good technique" or worse, bel canto.

This record is the extreme synthesis of years and years of study and experiments on the voice conducted in this direction. It is therefore not a music record, simply because melody is absent. And beware, this is not the typical provocative statement of the typical naysayer: you really don't see music around here.
Indeed, technically speaking, this is a record of vocalizations and vocal explorations of various kinds: grunts mixed with high notes at the limits of human conceivability, as in "Passages 1, 2", onomatopoeic gargles of all kinds ("Infantile Cryptomelodies"), vocal tangles formed by multiple simultaneous overlapping sounds "en route" (the astonishing "Flautophonies and more").

But all this is nothing compared to the main course, the shocking "Dipophonies, Tripophonies, Investigations". I am too cowardly to venture into explaining such a piece, so I decided to rely on Stratos' own words (carefully transcribed through the exhausting "play-pause" technique...). What I can add is that one is literally left stunned by how the typical monody is literally pulverized by extraordinarily clear diphonies and triphonies, with vocalizations that effectively represent mini-orchestrations. Two three sounds emitted simultaneously and easily distinguishable... In short, something truly aberrant.

That being said, to whom would I recommend such a record? Obviously, only to those who are particularly attracted to the immense potential of the human voice and the extraordinary technical abilities of Stratos. Even for them, however, the record requires repeated listens before it can be appreciated.