Rage by Franco Degrassi

Composed in 2009-2010.

REVIEWS

Behind the veil of loudspeakers of this acousmatic portrayal of rage, there is Franco Degrassi, one of the most skilled Italian divulger and well-tried collagist dealing with the so called acousmatic art, one of the highest form of electronic music based on a compositional method which Edgar Varese described as an organisation of sounds, coming from a plenty of sound sources, both acoustic and non-acoustic. The sensorial aspect of the composition is prominent in this branch of electronic music and, as most of our readers know, many acousmatic performers usually lavish somewhat obsessive attentions on sound space "set up" throughout complicated systems for loudspeakers' positioning and Mister Degrassi knows this field very well, as it projected his own acusmonium, called M.AR.E., often used in Silentes, the festival he used to organize in Puglia (one of the - just - two acousmatic festival in Italy) every year, a system for the "casting" of sound consisting of 26 amplifiers and 30 loudspeakers, inspired to the original French acusmonium and built up in strict collaboration with Denis Dufour and Jonathan Prager of the Motus association. The main limit to total enjoyment could be just the usage of a simple stereophonic system, but its eccentric and somewhat synesthetic sound treatments, declaredly inspired and influenced by the anger rising from nowadays society, according Franco own words, are equally enjoyable. The evidence these four long tracks (or maybe I should better call them "rages") on this issue are clearly acousmatic compositions and devoted to the praecepts of this art has been clearified in the title, as any furious recording refers to the rage (in Italian "rabbia") of various colors (red, yellow, white, grey), arguably a reference to the color of connectors on the back of the real performers on the stage, id est amplifiers and speakers. The first and the last composition, "La rabbia del giallo" and "La rabbia del bianco", are typical "serial" ones, based on the same processing algorithm loaded and coded on a Csound orchestra set of instructions, a series of sound sketches wandering about your speakers - I enjoyed the sandpapering of some chirping birds' uvulas on the passing of some rocket-like sound from the right to the left side of sound space or the shatterd barking of some angry dog... -, the second, entitled "La rabbia del grigio", could remind some Alva Noto pieces as it's mainly based on pulses and other recorded sounds, created by a sort of oscillator and reverb processor, while the third one, "La rabbia del rosso", my favorite piece among the four suites, is just a sort of "blurred" cloud derived from a real-time granular synthesizer, rich of electrical storms. Vito Camarretta (Chain DLK)

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Founded in 2000.

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