{"id":27240,"date":"2015-04-12T14:51:48","date_gmt":"2015-04-12T18:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=27240"},"modified":"2015-04-12T22:08:32","modified_gmt":"2015-04-13T02:08:32","slug":"preview-professor-bad-trip-a-dive-into-psychedelia-and-spectralism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2015\/04\/12\/preview-professor-bad-trip-a-dive-into-psychedelia-and-spectralism\/","title":{"rendered":"PREVIEW | Professor Bad Trip: A Dive Into Psychedelia and Spectralism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Professor
Professor Bad Trip, illustration.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Ever since I was born, I have been immersed in digitalised images, synthetic sounds and artefacts. Artificial, distorted, filtered \u2013 this is the nature of man today<\/em>.” –\u00a0Fausto Romitelli<\/p>\n

Thus summarizes the artistic legacy of Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004), a composer of Italian origin who had his career cut short by a long battle with cancer. Romitelli\u2019s extreme approach to composition involves clashing together discrepant elements of old-style musical rhetoric and synthetic distorted materials, often involving the use of electric guitar and MIDI keyboards. Romitelli\u2019s most well-known work, entitled Professor Bad Trip, is an epic LSD-fueled cycle of chamber music, evoking a dizzying array of artists and writers including Francis Bacon, Allen Ginsberg, Henri Michaux, and that master of LSD experimentation, Timothy Leary.<\/p>\n

Marketed by Ensemble Offspring as \u201cwhat classical music on drugs would sound like\u201d, the cycle is organized in a series of three \u201clessons\u201d, and navigates hazy impressionisms of post-war spectralism, 1970\u2019s Miles Davis and guitar-driven psychedelia. The music is highly reflective of Romitelli\u2019s own life and studies, which brought him both under the shadow of Boulez at IRCAM\u2019s electronic music studio, and later into Italy\u2019s psychedelic rock scene.<\/p>\n

Until very recently, Romitelli\u2019s music was practically unknown in North America, but this situation will be rectified in Toronto as the Music Gallery and Contact Contemporary Music gear up to perform the difficult cycle on April 18th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n

Rob MacDonald is Contact Contemporary Music\u2019s guitarist and is spearheading the project, though MacDonalds admits to originally being taken aback by the extremities of Romitelli\u2019s music:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I was a little freaked out – maybe startled a bit. Then curiosity led to a Youtube binge and I actually ran out and bought the Ictus Ensemble CD (hadn’t done that in a long time). Mostly, it was a whole new sound to me. I latched onto the ‘obsessive’ qualities in his music – how he states a simple musical idea, then revisits it constantly until it becomes lost.<\/p>\n

It struck me as a sort of refreshing, unedited, rougher minimalism in that sense.<\/p>\n

\"composer
composer Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Above all, Romitelli\u2019s music speaks about art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a time when distortion and synthesis are no longer terrifying prospects but normalized, and even celebrated procedures. Romitell\u2019s music, MacDonald says, chooses to not only accept the situation but to revel in its glories.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sorta think about it this way: we now have an entire generation of kids who think an un-auto-tuned singing voice sounds foreign and wrong,\u201d MacDonald says. \u201cThe only recorded sounds they really know are digital, controlled in every fashion. It’s how recorded ‘sounds’ exists in our time, whether we like it or not. Romitelli gets this and accepts it. In Bad Trip, he kinda celebrates it, embraces it, I think. Ultimately those sounds overtake everything else.\u201c<\/p>\n

Rounding out the concert program is a set by the Michael Eckert Large Earth Ensemble, or M.E.L.E.E. for short, who will pull tunes inspired by jazz, world music and classic rock into a more contemporary framework.<\/p>\n

Professor Bad Trip will be performed by Contact Contemporary Music at the Music Gallery, 8 p.m., April 18th<\/sup>, 2015. Details here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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