Franco Battiato
Pollution

Hallucinatory and visionary album, "Pollution", from 1972, represents the pinnacle of Franco Battiato's electronic experimentation. With a complex and almost prophetic structure, the new work of "Süphan Barzani" – this being the pseudonym of Battiato, the artist exhibiting his latest paintings – only continues the discourse already begun in "Fetus" the previous year: the embryo, having become a living being through a complex cellular journey, is now a distinct individual. As such, it is the subject of questions and riddles difficult to solve; the die is not cast, and in the widespread uncertainty, the vice of error, which so tormented the journey toward the birth of the original fetus, reigns supreme: the gamma that appears in the sinusoidal equation of "Phenomenology", a phase delay that, like an additive term, adds a perilous margin of uncertainty to the unknown of creation, is here an acquired fact, a negative whole that burdens man, depicting him in all his dilapidation.

It is therefore an album permeated by a patent Cosmic Pessimism, dark and inconsolable, capable of depicting at the same time a fascinating procession of future scenarios toward which the individual is, according to Battiato of the '70s, inevitably directed. Among these, the most curious and enigmatic is the aquatic scenario. "Pollution" is indeed a "liquid" as well as visionary album, a work filled with damp and slippery impressions to the point of lending itself, both musically and verbally, to a stagnant continuum that, starting from "Beta", flows into the Cosmic Lament of Battiato at the album's tail end.
"Plancton," the most illuminating track in this regard, presents to man a state transition towards the aquatic element, a monstrous transformation resulting in a concerning symbiosis where "hands become scales" and "hair becomes algae". A prophecy on industrial pollution? A return to man's aquatic origins according to the doctrine of Thales of Miletus? Pure and grotesque amusement?
There is a bit of everything in this vision of the Sicilian artist, and perhaps the only hypothesis to advance might be that in the continuous reference to water, Battiato simply wanted to refer to the purest element most common in the known natural environment, the primordial entity that nowadays finds itself often corrupted by human advances and thus "polluted" by an inexperienced hand: water as a source of life that now drags the waste of earthly work. Connected to this aquatic scenario is the electromagnetic delirium of the title track, where in a glacially didactic manner, Battiato provides a formal definition of a liquid's "flow rate," then concluding with an enigmatic final refrain amidst "electric fields," "atomic lithium," and "magnetic gas": a journey to the borders of the indivisible, a backward path that seems to once again reconnect to the "karyokinesis" of Fetus.

Consistently, finally, with the more pessimistic notation of the work, here comes the apocalyptic scenario of the end of existence. Humanity thus flows into the most grotesque "final solution" a Kabbalist could expect: in an anguished "silence of the noise" at the end of the second millennium, creation erupts in a thunderous roar with no possibility of appeal, an apocalyptic vision sardonically accompanied by an irritable voice reciting: "You have no strength to try / to change your future / for fear of discovering / freedom you don't want to have. / Have you ever wondered what function you have?". Franco asks more than once what the function of man is, and in an even more darkened and somber scenario like that of the last track, "Have You Ever Wondered What Function You Have?", indeed, the aforementioned Cosmic Lament seems to end any sort of constructive discussion on the subject.

The last representative element of the album is the homage to the charade. Taking up the old love for palindromic expressions, already measured in ghost-tracks like "Iloponitnatsoc" (1968?), a clear reversal of "Constantinople", here emerges the enigmatic "Areknames", with a vaguely palindromic text for vocals and keyboard, a true puzzle that implies phrases between the lines such as "Frontiers of the mind", "Metamorphosis moves the lands", and the like, with the margin of uncertainty that seems to have been added by a Battiato who, after reversing the track, also distorted it on purpose: any interpretation of the track, whether it refers to musical chords, a hypothetical character of ancient Egypt, the chakras of Awareness and Strength, results in being partial and without a precise answer. What interpretation, what indication from the enigmas of the revealed word? It is unknown.
"Within me live my identical life of microorganisms that do not know they belong to my body... To which body do I belong?"