Demetrio STRATOS
le Milleuna, pièce per Danza di Valeria Magli
CRAMPS Records
CRSCD 034 CD digi 2006

 This is easily the most frightening and naked recording by Greek vocalist Demetrio Stratos, scripted by poet Nanni Palestrini and later choreographed by Valeri Magli after his death. The text of Le Milleluna was 100 words, all beginning with the letter "s" and all of which had some sexual allusion or connotation. The show that Stratos performed was completely free of all academic exploration. Instead, he had internalized each of these words for an articulation original to the performance of the work, sometimes the words themselves as pronounced, whispered, sung, growled, moaned, groaned, and twitched, were entirely out of context with their textual definitions -- or seemingly so. But as Stratos roots them in the body, and in the body's ability to wrench meaning from elements of speech that are sometimes obfuscated by culture, the meaning becomes clear in the sound rather than in the elemental construct of the word itself, the actual word itself devoid of construction rather than deconstructed. Therefore, the text as it comes to the listener -- and, indeed, as it must have come to those attending the performance -- is raw, transgressive, and limitless. And so this document, whether heard once or a dozen times, gives up everything and nothing -- meaning is thrown to the wind because it is entirely composed of meaning read through the most essential glasses of the text: the human body not as it experiments with language, but as it experiences its articulation of desire. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide