Ictus - Fausto Romitelli: Professor Bad Trip (2003)

Ictus is providing a platform in this CD for Italy’s most surprising composer: Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004). It is a manifesto, a work which expresses his convictions. Although ‘contemporary music’ as we knew it (from Boulez to Lachenmann) is a closed chapter, this does not mean that from now on we should content ourselves with a peaceful return to order, to neo-classical evenly-spaced colonnades. Insolent in his modernity, Romitelli draws inspiration from the shady universe of psychedelic rock, seizes upon its electronic resonance, its hallucinatory zest, and plunges both into the cauldron of powerful composing of the kind inherited from Gérard Grisey - the art of sculpting the tones according to their natural resonance, until a ‘virtual world of sound’ emerges where everything co-exists - electronic trickery, acoustic splendor, the very substance of ‘dirty’ sound.
Romitelli breathes a sense of drama into this new science of ‘total sound’ which captures the listener’s imagination. It is an appeal to Henri Michaux’s writings on the effects of mescaline: the uncontrollable ebb and flow of the mind jostled by inner storms, the noise and fury of the world filtered by the highly refined ear. A visionary work.