"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 [...]. 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) www.chaindlk.com

www.federazionecemat.it/index.php?id=2.9.1.3&lg=it

The vision of the sound space offered by Franco Degrassi's piece Luminal is instead completely different, being topologically much more precise than the last piece and, as a consequence, a lot more abstract. In the first "bars" (space actually needs to be measured!) i immediately perceive a distinction that i had not perceived in the previous pieces: that between "right" and "left". It's not the banal effect produced by the spitting of stereo channels, but the result of a thorough treatment of sonic matter that distinguishes "open" sounds (dynamically in expansion) from " closed" sounds (tending toward absorbtion). For a perceptual reason that remains mysterius to my ear, i tend to identify the left with the closed sound and the right with the open sound, and this creates a sort off aural "corridor" apparently devoid off any obstacles. But in this piece to a kind of "latent dramaturgy" that often seems to accompany electronic sounds imposes a turning point, an accident, a "perturbing" factor. The straight and reassuring lineary of the "corridor" is broken by a kind of "mechanical" accident, an unexpected hindrance. The sound's breath suddenly becomes short: I associate this with the image of a gar activating another gear but having a broken cog that makes the motion broken, irregular, panting. As often happens when a complex mechanism begins to fail, the "virus" brimging on the anomaly quickly spreads to all of the machine's parts, and the machine starts to breathe almost painfully. The dense, magmatic, dark sound of the device clashes with the acoustic nerve, presses it violently, attacks it, almost makes it bleed. This is the new experience of an acoustic unease, of a small torture, that in the end leaves a feeling of exhausted emptiness, of a background with no foreground figure, of a lone machine deprived of its vital mechanism.
Guido Barbieri "The voice of I"

La visione dello spazio sonoro offerta dal pezzo di Franco Degrassi, Luminal, è del tutto diversa: per un verso topologicamente precisa e per l'altro, di conseguenza, assai astratta. Nelle prime"misure" ( in effetti lo spazio ha bisogno di essere misurato!) avverto subito una distinzione di cui non avevo ancora avuto esperienza: quella tra "destra" e "sinistra": non è solo l'effetto del banale sdoppiamento stereofonico dei canali di emissione: è invece il risultato di un vero e proprio trattamento sonoro della materia fonica che distingue il suono "aperto" ( dinamicamente in espansione) dal suono "chiuso" ( che tende cioè all'assorbimento): per una ragione percettiva che rimane ( al mio orecchio) misteriosa, tendo ad indentificare con la sinistra il suono chiuso e con la destra il suono aperto, disegnando dunque una sorta di "corridoio" sonoro apparentemente sgombro di ostacoli. Ma anche in questo caso una sorta di "drammaturgia latente" che sembra spesso accompaganare il suono elettronico, impone una svolta, un incidente, un "perturbante". A turbare la linearità rettilinea e rassicurante del"corridoio" interviene una sorta di incidente "meccanico", un inceppamento inatteso. Il respiro del suono si fa improvvisamente corto: sembra di sentire una ghiera dentata che ne fa ruotare un'altra, ma un dente è spezzato e il moto è ansimante, irregolare, strappato. Come spesso accade quando un meccanismo complesso entra in crisi il "virus" dell'anomalia si diffonde rapidamente a tutte le parti della macchina: che infatti comincia a respirare in modo quasi doloroso. Il suono denso, magmatico, scuro del congegno entra in conflitto con il nervo acustico, lo sollecita con violenza, lo attacca, lo fa quasi sanguinare: è l'esperienza, nuova, del disagio acustico, della piccola tortura, che alla fine lascia la sensazione di un vuoto spossato, di uno sfondo senza figura, di una macchina celibe privata del suo meccanismo vitale. 

Guido Barbieri "La voce di Io"

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