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CD edition. There is no figure in Italian music, nor within the country’s shimmering, expansive avant-garde, who demands the respect and awe offered to Franco Battiato. He is the beginning and the end. An artist whose output, stretching across six decades, is so diverse and singular, that it defies any concrete definition - darting from psychedelic Prog, definitive gestures in the history of Minimalism, to the heights of explicit Pop. Like many of his contemporaries, Battiato’s journey toward av…
Pollution
Franco Battiato's wonderfully lively 1973 concept album Pollution is an audaciously psychedelic album drawn from the space rock dimension with good portions of electronics and keyboard layers. Drawing heavily on the VCS3 synthesizer, Battiato and company (besides himself, three backing band members play synth as well) give Pollution an extreme electronic edge. With comparisons to Ash Ra Tempel, Faust, and Pink Floyd, Pollution was declared 'genius' by Frank Zappa.
Fetus
Franco Battiato moved into the 1970s on the crest of the progressive rock wave. This 1972 impossibly strange record inhabits that nether world of pop music, electronics, politics and experimental rock. Fetus is an album beyond all definition. It's a masterpiece of daring and wild risks that work every single time. Battiato takes us through eight uniquely super-detailed songs that tug at the heart strings as no other experimental record ever could."Fetus is an album beyond all definition. It's a …
Sulle corde di Aries
* 300 copies, machine-printed numbered edition, gatefold cover, 180gr vinyl * 1973’s Sulle Corde Di Aries was Franco Battiato's third release and showed his fascination for electronic, minimalist and systemic musics, as well as his third chapter in Battiato’s foray into esoteric pop. While the artist would venture further out into avant-garde terrain on subsequent releases, his early records enjoy a lyrical and playful spirit—eschewing traditional, song-based composition in favor of kosmische vo…
Syn•Thesis
*300 copies limited edition* Once again Lino surprises us. Always a poet of silences and strictly acoustic sounds, now he offers an album where synthetic sounds are the protagonists. On the other hand, since the time of the collaborations with Franco Battiato, the VCS3 has been in the poetics of Lino and Franco. Thus, as often happens, even the new and the old are in sympathetic symbiosis. And this album is the definitive proof of this. What makes it truly incredible is that it doesn't matter wh…
False Memory Syndrome
"In 1980 the Italian musicians Piero Chianura (bass guitar, samples, synthesizers) and Luciano Margorani (electric guitar, devices) founded LA 1919 in Milan, Italy. False Memory Syndrome is their sixth album on which guest drummer Federico Zenoni can be heard on all tracks. Una Giornata Particolare - Ore 18 contains the screams of Enrico Salvi. It's not easy to describe the musical style of LA 1919; it's undoubtedly progressive, but without the rock references, nor is it freestyle jazz, backgrou…
Vietato Ai Minori Di 18 Anni?
Limited Time Offer Deluxe ltd. ed. LP edition with original gatefold cover artwork and 180 gr. Clear Red Vinyl. One of the best italian progressive rock/experimental album released in Italy "Vietato ai minori di 18 anni?" is Jumbo's third album from 1973, is their most ambitious work, containing strong lyrics and fragments of avantgarde-inspired music, with the help of Franco Battiato's great VCS3 oscillators and Lino Capra Vaccina's (of Aktuala fame) bells and chimes' sinister tolling. Long spa…
l'Egitto prima delle Sabbie
*White vinyl repress* Mindblowing! The last album of what could be called Franco Battiato's "experimental prog" period, L'Egitto Prima Delle Sabbie consists of two sidelong compositions strictly arranged for piano only, without any vocals; and even more intriguingly, neither of the performers on the album are Battiato himself. He limited himself strictly to the roles of composer and producer. After Battiato's many different sonic explorations and efforts throughout the '70s, such an effort may s…
Juke Box
*White vinyl repress* The highly neglected record by Franco Battiato! Originally intended as the soundtrack for TV movie 'Brunelleschi', it was rejected — allegedly, for being "not appropriate enough". Their loss. It is also the first official collaboration with Giusto Pio, at the time engaged as violinist in the RAI orchestra of Milan, as well as first violin at Orchestra - Teatro alla Scala. Over the following decades, Pio and Battiato formed a close collaborative relationship – chasing each …
Motore Immobile
To quote Pitchfork, this is 'one of the most sumptuous, spiritual ambient albums of any era or provenance.
Via Lattea
Via Lattea is the new recording project of the music and performance research ensemble Enten Hitti. The work takes inspiration from research on the “feminine” and from the matrilineal transmission of life. It is the result of various research trips to the places where the culture of the “sacred female” took shape over 4000 years ago: Cyprus, Crete, Turkey, Ireland, South Africa, Indonesia … The historical and geographical suggestions have been freely reinterpreted and transformed into musical pi…
Free Spirits
'When I first had the chance to listen at Markus Stockhausen performing live at Conservatorio Nicolini in Piacenza, some years ago, I immediately had the intuition of this musical meeting. I was sure that the poetry of Lino Capra Vaccina will melt with Markus’ one in a completely intuitive, spontaneous way, creating something really unusual, really new. When, some months later, I had the chance to produce then meet the great Santoor player Alireza Mortazavi for the album Hamdelaneh (with Markus,…
Alla Periferia Dell'Impero (LP)
500 numbered copies Remastered from the original tapes. Like many of his peers, Mino Di Martino first emerged within the context of popular music, working in numerous Italian beat bands, before finding enormous success as a pop star as a member of I Giganti, whose 1971 LP, Terra in Bocca, is often cited as a spark for the sea change in Italian music that would emerge over the coming years.
After his experience with Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale (together with the actress and singer Edda 'Terra…
Franco Battiato, Nucleus (Book)
Absolutely recommended. Photographs by Roberto Masotti, texts by Carlo Maria Cella, Silvia Lelli, Luca Scarlini. This is the third volume dedicated to musicians-composers that Masotti has collected for and with the publisher Seipersei after those dedicated to Keith Jarrett and John Cage. The one on Battiato shows a panorama of photographs that starts in 1973 with a service made in Bologna in the studio and on location commissioned by the Bla Bla label by Pino Massara and followed by a whole seri…
Area Di Servizio
* Clear red vinyl edition * "Area di Servizio" is a truly unique release in the history of ‘70s Italian music: a record consisting of twelve Italian-sung compositions, mainly the result of the collaboration between Riccardo “Rolli” Pirolli and Franco Battiato: the first came from the Cristalli Fragili group, which Battiato wanted as his musicians in the early seventies. The album recording sessions lasted a few days, and several songs were written and arranged directly in the studio. The result …
Franco Battiato
Temporary nicer price * * 45th Anniversary Edition, 180 gr. Red Vinyl * *Franco Battiato also known as "Za" was the first album for Ricordi, and the Franco Battiato's conceptualism becomes very rigorous and authoritative. It is made of two long tracks, Za, in the author's own words "Apparently poor. Almost completely made up of one chord. Deliberately percussive (the right pedal is never used), it divides and subtracts resonances, with a technique of release. It needs a listening that I would de…
Foetus
* Limited clear Green vinyl edition / Silver laminated cover* English language version! Fetus, housed in a outrageous cover (reproducing a foetus) was definitely a prog album, but a very original one, with a minimalist sound mainly based on the use of a VCS3 synth, unusual lyrics, complex arrangements. Deluxe remastered issue, gatefold cover. "Fetus is an album beyond all definition. It's a masterpiece of daring and wild risks that work every single time. Franco Battiato takes us through eight u…