Rave party, mass of the senses, limits of perception, trance, initiation rite, capture, immersion, assassination. Fiona Monbet and the Miroirs Étendus ensemble invite you to rediscover Fausto Romitelli’s unclassifiable, hallucinatory work, An Index of Metals, in a new record from b•records at La Soufflerie de Rézé.
An incandescent performance by singer Linda Oláh sheds light on the thousand reflections of this unique sound experience, a ‘mass for the senses’ that Romitelli imagined as the revival of the operatic genre at the turn of the 21st century.
Premiered at the Nouveau Siècle in Lille in 2019, it toured in 2019-2020 at the Opéra de Rouen and at the Kantine am Berghain in a stage version, and will be revived for the 2023-2024 season at the Milano Musica (Milan, IT) and Nei Suoni Dei Luoghi (Gorizia, IT) festivals.
Rave party, mass of the senses, limits of perception, trance, initiation rite, capture, immersion, assassination. That’s the programme for Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals. We tell you all about it and, above all, we listen!
Interview france musique – disque contemporain de la semaine
An Index of Metals is undoubtedly one of the greatest works of the 21st century. With this work, Fausto Romitelli promised to cross a threshold. This is evidenced by an initial note of intent bursting with extreme words: rave party, mass of the senses, limits of perception, trance, initiation rite, capture, immersion, assassination. Through filtered sound and saturated images, in slow, leaden tempos, heavy with fatigue, where every sound slowly slides towards distortion and wear, Fausto Romitelli takes us to the very edge of contemporary music.
Credits : Photo Frederic Iovino ; ©Munari | Studio Hanninen
A work of limits, written under the influence of psychedelic rock and electronic music, under the influence of Pink Floyd and Pan Sonic, An Index of Metals offers an impressive and vertiginous plunge, an immense visual and sonic plunge into the musicality of our time. It’s an ode, as well as a requiem, to all sensible and palpable reality, to matter itself, which we see gleaming and shimmering on the three giant screens, dancing absurd ballets of molecules, and finally plummeting into the final vertigo of a waste recycler. Composed by Fausto Romitelli in fifty days, working fifteen hours a day, during the last years of his life, An Index of Metals marks a break with ‘pure’ music and the invention of a new sublime.
