Franco Battiato
Correnti gravitazionali

Why own a collection (a posthumous one, in this case) of an artist whose entire discography you already possess? Well, the answer can only be irrational: it depends solely on being a (die-hard) fan of that particular artist, thus supporting the very mercenary commercial operations put into effect by various record labels. In this specific case, I was utterly indecisive until the last moment whether to purchase the CD in question, released in 2022 (yes, I still buy CDs: I'm really old inside and out), at a price that was anything but modest. In the end, I capitulated and gave in, as was only natural since I am a (die-hard) fan of Franco Battiato. However, for a few years now, to try to justify (at least partly) these weaknesses of mine and to try to give them some meaning, I've devised a strategy: when I purchase a collection or a live album from an artist I like (even if not posthumous), I never look at the tracks beforehand, so I never know what to expect when I "put the CD on the player," essentially going "sight unseen." And that's exactly what I did this time as well.

Well, after these preliminaries, I can finally start the CD, and since it's Franco Battiato, I find myself immediately catapulted into a delightful space-time journey and "see" unfolding before me, among other things: a solitary summer beach where the echo of an open-air cinema reaches; hotels full in Tunis for the summer holidays and Damascene students all dressed alike, hoping for the return of the "era of the white boar"; Euclidean Jesuits dressed like bonzes entering the court of Ming dynasty emperors; the wrath of Afghan refugees who moved from the border to Iran, American Indians, and the erotic exploits of "Moon Skin" squaws; the space between the clouds where birds fly, with their wings opening games and their existential geometry codes; desert gypsies dancing with chandeliers on their heads and Balinese dancing in equal measure on feast days; the fields of Tennessee (and not tennis fields, as an interviewer once told Franco a few years ago); frontier villages where they still watch trains to Tozeur go by; Nevsky Prospect, with Igor Stravinsky and a master teaching you how difficult it is to find the dawn within the dusk; Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, outside the theater with snow.

And also: the animal I carry inside, that makes me a slave to my passions, never lets me live happily, and takes everything, even the coffee; the hyenas of stadiums and those of newspapers, while the boot of pigs sinks in the mud; buried civilizations, drifting continents, anomalous travelers in mystical territories, instinctively following the trails of comets as vanguards of another solar system; the mythical desires of Libyan prostitutes, the sense of possession that was pre-Alexandrian, the tantric Shaivism of a Dionysian style and the pornographic struggle of Greeks and Romans; crude cybernetic neo-primitives, lords of the rings, pride of asylums; the horizontal line that pushes us towards matter and the vertical one that leads us towards the spirit; information, coitus, locomotion, diametrical limitations, and 720 houses; a swing noise coming from the Neolithic, the Holocene, and the sound of a violin surrounded by dawn and morning; the migrants from Ganden in bodies of light on invisible planets.

The sound journey is equally pleasant and fascinating, between pop, rock, ballads, electronic, new wave, etc. etc. etc.

In conclusion, not all albums of our artist are represented in this collection: in fact, there are no tracks at all from the early "experimental" albums, from "Fetus" to "L'Egitto prima delle sabbie," nor are there tracks from the albums "Caffè de la Paix," "L'ombrello e la macchina da cucire," "Ferro battuto," "Dieci stratagemmi," "Il vuoto," "Apriti sesamo," and "Joe Patti's Experimental Group.". But what is present is more than enough to deserve my five stars. The judgment naturally refers to the value of the tracks contained in the collection and not to the unscrupulous commercial operation by the record label, to which I would instead assign zero stars, the same I would assign to myself for making it possible and thus being complicit in such a misdeed. Furthermore, in this case, there was not even a need for even a poor inédit (a very common thing in these cases) to lure me in.

P.S. I quote another author very dear to me: "we are perhaps stupid and maybe you know it, that's why you love us and never leave us": In this case, the reference is to television, but we can very well apply the phrase to record labels and remove the "perhaps" (perhaps). P.S. 2 "Let's send into retirement the artistic directors, the cultural officers."