Franco Battiato
Dieci Stratagemmi

Indisputable premise, with the relative touch of wood: sooner or later "we will have to cross the door of supreme fear", as suggested by the catatonic voice of the old Manlio Sgalambro, who, as a good philosopher, faces the issue without batting an eyelid. It is not said that beyond there is a sweet dream, lyrical as Battiato imagines: Guccini on the subject is terribly prosaic ("then finally we will all have two meters of earth"). In any case, it's better not to force the transition through this door, so similar to the legendary Doors of Perception by William Blake from which the Doors took their name, and we all know how the last attempt by Jim Morrison to cross them ended.
It is better to stay on this side and not lean too much over the abyss: now strategist Battiato gives us a hand, a bit of a philosopher himself after hanging out with Sgalambro. He provides us with a dozen brand new stratagems, in order to "cross the sea to deceive the sky" which more or less, translating from Battiato's high-flown language to plain speak, means screw a world that's becoming more disgusting, increasingly permeated with "The smell of gunpowder", which might have its own charm, as the new "aesthetes of war" say, but as far as I'm concerned, it remains an appalling stench.

This record is a sort of vademecum for crossing the desert, where the desert is the current world, and it is no coincidence that the most touching message, in the beautiful prayer "Comfort to Life", is ultimately the immortal "Ha da passà 'a nuttata" by Eduardo, which in Battiato's language becomes "Evening teaches to await the day that comes as always to close the passages of the night".
"Resist, resist, resist!" as a famous magistrate once said: the "Fortezza Bastiani" is not an outpost towards the absurd like in Buzzati's novel, but represents what is still healthy and intact, and it must be defended with all our might against the "liars and charlatans" who "siege it with violence worthy of Tamerlane" (and here the enemy is so well delineated that, at least as far as Italy is concerned, we can even give him a first and last name). "Fortezza Bastiani" is embellished with very sweet music, which adapts well to describing something fragile and precious, to be absolutely protected. The nightmares are not missing, worthy offspring of "Shock in my town". "Hermeneutics", the most successful, brings out apocalyptic yet realistic speeches on the political situation from a tragic magma of sounds, powerful almost like hard rock, but interrupted by chilling syncopations in which keyboards as cold as marble reprise the sparse motif that accompanies the first words: "The Empire ejaculates prematurely...". A true visionary masterpiece. In terms of atmosphere, it pairs with "23 pairs of chromosomes", perhaps a little less intense but equally tremendous: a Battiato in television announcer format unravels hallucinatory speeches over a base of absurd and disjointed electronic sounds, which then find release in an Arabic chant by a muezzin.
But on this side of the famous Door fortunately there are not only nightmares and apocalypses: there is also an perhaps disruptive but natural inner struggle, the one "Between sex and chastity", to which one of the most inspired songs on the album is dedicated. The outcomes of this struggle, combined with the need to live "against", by resisting, can easily lead to loneliness, but Battiato has a stratagem for this too: "Eagles don't fly in flocks", lulling us with soft oriental harmonies, he gives us a nice ginseng to better face rather unpleasant phenomena such as regrets and the ravages of time.

By now, saying that this author never ceases to amaze us is almost clichéd: let's say that each of his records is a nice dose of phosphorus, but much more pleasant than cod liver oil.