AN INDEX OF METALS

A video-opera by Fausto Romitelli (music) and Paulo Pachini (video)
for soprano, ensemble, multiprojection (3 screens) and electronics

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.

Shortly before his death, Romitelli together with his friend Paolo Pachini and the poetess Kenka Lèkovich, resurrected the dream of a total scenic art 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, acoustic/electric music highly amplified, filtered, spatialised, in as artificial a manner as possible…
An Index of Metals, a paradoxical masterpiece, torn between heroism and exhaustion.

(Text © Jean-Luc Plouvier)

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