Giusto Pio: Legione straniera (EMI, 1982)

I hope you'll get used to the publishing of some Battiato-related stuff every now and then in the blog's "Eighties" corner. I personally believe his school is one of the greatest moments to ever bless Italian pop music. As for today, let's concentrate on the second solo album by Giusto Pio, 1926-born violin teacher and longtime collaborator of Battiato's.

As a matter of fact, "Legione straniera" is a two-hands work by Pio and Battiato. Pio's compositional style relies mostly on his violin, and embodies an ideal trait-d'union between baroque music and postmodern minimalism. Elegance, repetition, and regularity are the key aspects of the albums, where schematic violin themes fluctuate over Battiato's straight beats, evocating sometimes an outworld placidity, other times more nervous and metropolitan ambiences.
The album collects many extra-European suggestions, but never actually sounds like world music. And despite the strong electronic architecture, the prevailing air is a noble fin de siècle mood.

Tracklist:

1. Aria di un tempo
2. Celestial tibet
3. Cristina's Day
4. Eritrea's
5. Giardino segreto
6. Legione straniera
7. Ostinato
8. Totem

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Warning: the audio quality is quite bad


Similar music on the blog:
Franco Battiato: Giubbe Rosse (EMI, 1989)
Francesco Messina: Medio Occidente (Casablanca Records, 1983)

Francesco Messina: Medio Occidente (Casablanca Records, 1983)

The heritage of the Cosmic Couriers, the new technologies and the beggings of synth-pop, minimalism... And the Mediterranean: the fascination for the Middle-Eastern tradition and philosophy. "Medio occidente" is on the frontier of these musical worlds, which are surprisingly close one another.
The mood reminds of a starker Vangelis, of Philip Glass, or Franco Battiato's most "ethnic" works. The latter is not a coincidence: Francesco Messina is a longtime acquantaince and collaborator of Battiato's. Most of the tracks are hypnotic instrumental wanderings, suspended in an ecstatic calm. The hushed timbres are disposed with a somehow architectural aesthetics, and the synthetic beats obey to a strictly functional logic. There's a veil of melancholy and decadence over them though, and the few tracks with vocal parts emphasize the sensation. The overall ambience is dusty and soaked with helplessness. Some retro-fashioned vocal intrusions (opera singing, craking radio excerpts) project a sense of nostalgia for the old times, probably the colonial era when Europe extended over all of the Mediterranean...

Francesco Messina was born in 1951 in Sicily, but moved to Milan tu study design. There he became involved with Franco Battiato's artistic entourage. This is his second solo album, after a lot of collaborations (both musical and graphical). He is now married with singer Alice, and he is a university professor in the field of graphic design.

(I could not find a bigger image, sorry)

Tracklist:

1. Marcia di Kioto
2. Harem
3. Uffici del 126° piano
4. Russian tea room
5. Plaza tonal
6. Fine novecento
7. Club Mediterranée
8. Comunicazioni interne

Download (210 kbps)

Similar albums on the blog:

Franco Battiato: Giubbe Rosse (EMI, 1989)

Nicola Alesini, Pier Luigi Andreoni: Marco Polo (Materiali sonori, 1996)

Automat: Automat (EMI, 1978)

Progressive and italo-disco? Sounds foolish, but "Automat" is not an isolated case: in the end of the 70s, more than an artist tried to merge the neoclassical grandeur of spaghetti-prog and the electronic grooves of Giorgio Moroder.
"Automat" is anyway one of the most accomplished attempts at this fusion. Listening to it is like spinning Jean-Michael Jarre on one deck, Midnight Express theme on the other and discovering they fit perfectly. The album has something like a concept, dealing with the adventures of a golem-like robot. It is no futurist work though: instead of celebrating the glory of the machine, the music portays a somehow disillusioned spleen. Baroque fugues inspired by Bach, minimalist repetitions and crystalline synth layerings disclose an alabastrine melancholy, the one of a creature which can't feel at home in the human world. A steampunk version of Alan Moore's Dr. Manhattan.

Automat was a short-lived project of soundtrack composers Claudio Gizzi and Romano Musumarra, together with sound engineer Mario Maggi. The album was entirely performed (even the drums!) on the MCS70 analog synthetizer, designed by Maggi himself. The first half of the record features Gizzi's compositions, the second one Musumarra's.
Trivia: J.-M. Jarre was the first person to get a copy of "Automat".

Tracklist:

1. Automat: (The) Rise
2. Automat: (The) Advance
3. Automat: (The) Genus
4. Droid
5. Ultraviolet
6. Mecadance

Download (320 kbps)

Similar albums on the blog:
Easy Going: Fear (Banana Records, 1979)
Giorgio Moroder: E=mc² (Durion, 1979)