La Fura Dels Baus
XXX

“Every man hides in his heart a pig that sleeps.”
(Anonymous)

I want to talk to you about the soundtrack of this show by the Fura dels Baus, the most provocative Catalan theater ensemble of the last 20 years, which has fed on strong provocations and truly appreciable contaminations since its beginnings.
The show “XXX” (the title says it all) is a really strong and at times “disturbing” show with contrasting representations on the verge of the pornographic (the show was continually plagued by complaints and censorship orders for months and months, even though it was explicitly prohibited to minors under 18).
But what is in its own way more original and appreciable about the project concerns the purely musical aspect.
 
Among classical compositions, easy-pop, Gregorian chants, dub atmospheres, electronic minimalism, trance, and techno, the music here is put at the service of the images in a continuous interplay between sacred and profane. In every track of this double CD, sexuality radiates, and the various themes underline its different natures, creating a corpus unicum that is truly exciting and sensual like few others.

The record label Subterfuge gathered fifteen contemporary composers who were nearly unknown and different from each other (Belmonde, Miki Espuma, Fangoria, Lucho Prósper, Elesbaan, Milinko, Robert Merdzo, and others), each with their own vision of sex, and let them freely interpret in order to subvert the rules of stylistic unity, thus achieving a disorienting and at times shocking effect.
It's a soundtrack, and therefore every situation is created ad hoc to suggest the right atmosphere for each scene or to reposition the viewer, at every moment of the story, in an ideal dimension integrated with understanding.
The theme of the show XXX, as we said, is Sex and Flesh, and the music adapt and complete the picture excellently. Among couplings, perversions, primordial sounds, spoken interludes, poetic compositions, labored breaths, hypnotic tunes, and tribal rhythms, the Fura exorcises gestures and words, channeling them into a sort of "Concept Album" where the common thread lies in a single keyword: Desire.

The listener thus becomes unconsciously a voyeur of mental images that he must reconstruct by himself. A perverse imaginer of sounds and images (the CD obviously shows nothing!) that he wishes to see and imagine, leveraging the more animalistic part of himself. And it is not difficult to imagine the visual orgy of the show that scandalized half of Europe, in a representation overflowing with sexual organs in action, organic liquids, multiple fellations, complete with advertisements for websites offering virtual pleasure for a fee (S/M, anal, oral, homo, bondage, fetishism, depending on the perversions).

Sure, "the music is not the image" but I assure you that this double CD (difficult to find today) with its subdued and enticing atmospheres has fixed certain of my spicy evenings in an indelible manner in my memory (hoping that it lasts along with the rest!).…