Fausto Romitelli

hortly before his death (ten years ago), Fausto Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art (a furnace of sensations, they called it, an_ initiation rite_) in the manner of the Futurists: rhythms and gleams of light striking metals (for the video part), poems in iron and chrome singing of fusion with matter (Kenka Lekovich), acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner as possible... To the poetics of anamorphosis and distortion he inherited from his great spiritual brothers, Romitelli added a new watchword which would soon become all the rage: saturation.

 An Index of Metals bears vigorous witness to this determination to go beyond: sizzling orchestration, electric and psychedelic; a voice which plays on effects, murmurs with reverb, cackles into a megaphone, screams like a pop star; and an electric guitar score of a kind that no ‘serious’ composer has ever written, sliding across an infinite range of tones with a lightness of touch and blurring of contours.    

But that's not all. Something more funereal, more strongly dissolving is given off: a fierce melancholy, and the echo, as it were, of a long Gnostic lament over the fall of souls. Index of Metals is saturated, first and foremost with this madrigalism of the Fall: an endless sliding of all melody towards the grave, of all harmony towards its dissolution, of all timbre towards its own outworn noise. All this, nevertheless, was filtered by that most refined pair of ears: Romitelli was, essentially, a harmonist. 

Fausto Romitelli died in 2004 at the age of 41. He’d studied in Siena with Franco Donatoni and then at Ircam in Paris, where he also encountered spectralist composers such as Grisey and Murail. In his last decade, Romitelli’s fusion of spectralist techniques with the gestures and soundworld of rock had begun to attract international attention, and since his death it has been his video opera, An Index of Metals from 2003, that’s been most widely admired and performed.