Fausto Romitelli
Professor Bad Trip

Inspired by the texts of the surrealist Henri Michaux written under the influence of drugs and hallucinogens, the cycle "Professor Bad Trip" is one of the most significant achievements in the artistic journey of Fausto Romitelli. A piece of just over 40 minutes divided into three parts or "lessons" (Lesson I, Lesson II, and Lesson III lasting 14, 17, and 11 minutes respectively) with an ensemble that ranges from 8 to 10 instrumentalists.

What makes this piece so vital and seductive is the constant contamination of ideas, cues, solutions that from extra-classical suggestions are integrated into the musical fabric of a cultured composition. Thanks to Romitelli's great timbral sensitivity, in the three lessons we find a dense sound blend in which the individualities of the instruments can still be clearly perceived: including the electric guitar, often distorted, which is a constant in this composer's music.

The use of the repetition of short phrases or melodic cues translates into an enchanting atmosphere, of trance; as happens at the end of the three pieces, which always fade into soft and dark electronic sounds dissolving into silence. Acid, distorted sounds, like the stunning electrified cello solo you hear in the first minutes of the second lesson. The sound panorama is seen as through a deforming lens, in this music the fusion of acoustic/electric planes takes place.

Considering that the compositional trajectory of Romitelli took place over a fifteen-year period, this piece, written between 1998 and 2000, perhaps represents his most representative work.

But the CD, released by the Belgian label Cypres with the musicians of the Ictus Ensemble, contains three other pieces by the Gorizian composer: "Green Yellow and Blue" for ensemble (2003), not very different from what has been observed above (except for its brevity, just 6 and a half minutes), and two pieces for solo instrument. One, "Seascape", is written for that very strange instrument that is the Paetzold flute: a bass recorder with dark, muffled sounds, which Romitelli handles with absolute mastery creating a work whose title already says it all: a seascape explored in its darkest, most mysterious and fascinating recesses.

The other piece, "Trash TV Trance", is a wild solo for electric guitar in which Romitelli draws an infinity of sounds from one of his favorite instruments, deriving as much from the use of distortion and other effects (in this following performance practices borrowed from rock) as from the heretic and iconoclastic reinvention of an instrument intended as a mere sound generator, whatever their nature may be: thus, the guitar is struck on the fretboard with drumsticks, the jack removed from the connector and placed on the strings, on the bridge, or touched with fingers to provoke glitches that in all respects become part of the sound palette of the instrument.

This is the great lesson of Fausto Romitelli. With his music, many barriers fall: cultured and extra-cultured, classical and popular, sacred and profane merge into a highly controlled blend in which what matters is the expressive power of the musical language. To make cultured music, Wagner or Beethoven are no longer the only admissible references: Jim Morrison or Aphex Twin are also fine, as well as psychedelic rock and techno, and Romitelli embraces all this but imposing very precise conditions: never retreating into convenient solutions, never abandoning the path of complexity.