Franco Battiato
Clic

The Battiato of the '70s is a refined experimenter, a curious interpreter who, through the sole dispute of music, with some verbal flash rather than verbosity - as will instead happen from the '80s onwards -, expresses what the melodically sluggish contemporaries are not granted to know, play or sing.

We had seen Battiato well, on the back cover of "Fetus" from 1971: a view from the bottom upwards, sideburns and an elongated face in the perfect style of the best poor man's Nosferatu; this emaciated character is destined to become great, but before doing so, he will pass through the Limbo of electronic experimentation, with courage and without any commercial pretense. After the amniotic "Pollution" of '72, and the even less immediate "Sulle Corde Di Aries" a year later, here is Franco reappearing on the desolate scene in '74 with an LP that will remain among the best of his long and still fervent musical career. "Clic," so it is called, is presented on the cover with a checkered pattern with the author's original signature, and after fetuses and bolted oranges, one must ask if the covers are not actually improving despite their aesthetic asepticism.

It's an almost entirely instrumental album, proving that the Sicilian songwriter prefers for now to express himself through the only true expressive means that mortals call "music," with a sacrificed renunciation of vocal expression and approval of the purists of the dismal national criticism.
I Cancelli Della Memoria, with beautiful sax execution, Il Mercato Degli Dei, and Propiedad Prohibida, the historical theme of Tg2 Dossier, are the most suggestive pieces, suspended between minimalism, psychedelia, and electronic simulations, while Ethika Fon Ethica and Rien Ne Va Plus: Andante are stylistic exercises - not to mention mental jerks - through which Battiato plays target practice. Rich with reminiscences is also Nel Cantiere Di Un'Infanzia, but if we must talk about a masterpiece, it is better to break the hesitation and talk about the only sung track of the work, the one that will remain the most important declaration of poetics of the entire Battiato production from '72 to the present day, perhaps even more than the shrewd I'm That of 30 years later: the rough and hypnotic No U Turn. With this piece, Battiato, as will not happen in any other record, completely bares himself, revealing torpor and swooning belonging to the past of a man rather than a singer, speaking of "ghosts of anguish" and "losses of self" that afflicted him, admitting to having thrown his "paper myths" on "skies of schizophrenia": he alludes to a past for which there will be no more "u turn," no reversal, as in the language of road signage; the journey is completing, and the path is now traveled. A triptych piece, with an enigmatic reversed text at the beginning, sung part in the middle, orgasm of bagpipes and a soprano voice at the end.
It will certainly not remain in the history of music, but at least, dedicated to the more squeamish, Franco Battiato has spoken of something that wasn't a castle in the air.