Franco Battiato
M.elle le "Gladiator"

M.elle le "Gladiator".

The most controversial work of experimental Battiato comes to light in 1975, a few months after the ethereal "Clic": seated in a striped sweater in front of a complex framework of synthesizers, Franco decides to create a new musical sculpture, and he does so with a work that veers towards rugged sounds. M.elle le "Gladiator" is a debatable and steep work, an ideal border between experimentation and discard.

Battiato had grown quickly: in order to show that he didn't want to submit his work to commercial logic, he settled in front of his VCS3 to violate its roughest sounds, he had given birth to a new musical science foretelling by a few years the same use of synthesizers as the more electophile Tangerine Dream. The stylistic exercises had produced in order the linear "Fetus", the swampy "Pollution", the anamnetic "Sulle corde di Aries" and "Clic": each product completed the ritual project, experimentation generated a finished work. This time, however, the premises generate something that escapes classification: M.elle le "Gladiator" is light years away from previous works; it is profoundly different because it expands those sketches that served as fillers in "Pollution" and "Clic", recognizes the central role of that exquisitely sound production which now rises to the role of music. "Goûtez et comparez" is a collage. It's a divertissement, an extended development of that "Ethika fon ethica" that a year before had given the sparse audience the impression of listening to a continuously manipulated radio: Battiato inserts himself here and there with a voice (voluntarily or not) still quite attached to dialectal inflections, often and willingly inserts overdubs, samples historical snippets; inspired by the rich mosaics of Monreale Cathedral, Franco as artist-demiurge "tastes" and "compares" the pieces of his musical sculpture. The work achieves its completed result two-thirds into the piece, when, on the same kaleidoscopic sounds as "Sequenze e Frequenze", the synthesizer's thread sets the tone for the requiem for the organ
and warbles with which the comparative work can finally find its definitive and grandiloquent outcome. "Canto Fermo" bursts in with a screech, continuing at the same time the logical sequence undertaken by "Goûtez et Comparez". The Monrealese organ, violated just like the keyboards of "Una Cellula" and "Fetus", finds its strength in contrast: shrill stalactites rise in the expository part, desert carpets in the epilogue. It is full musical dissent through which the author relates only to the instrument: the beat and polemical Battiato who in previous works never lost the reference point of the musical context now distances himself from it, closing himself in the mystical dome where musical research transcends the cultural and social moment. It is a Battiato alone in execution and experimentation, an autarkic artist. Thus, he proceeds to the conclusion of the work through "Orient Effects", the third piece of the work: cohesive development of the previous "Canto Fermo", a natural emanation that places the Catanese author in front of the same musical choices as the second piece; tragic development, stasis and impetuous outcome, all under the aegis of the usual roaring organ.

The overall effect is disconcerting. The musical pieces must violently impact the less accustomed ears in order to assert their power: Battiato has created a new experimental language that also draws from his own production. The musical exercise is in a new raw form, past times almost drowned: it's no coincidence that experimental Battiato enthusiasts loved "Fetus" and "Pollution" but not this work, at the limit between research and aimless play. But in doubt in this analysis, one will want to preserve the suspension of judgment, declaring neither winners nor losers; the outcome will be determined by the word, the dedication to Riccardo Mondadori in the note to "Canto Fermo":

"A lui la vita non è stata tolta, ma solo trasformata"

The eternal return.