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*RAPPEL, 1978*

After *Juke Box* (1977), the inseparable duo Pio - Battiato devoted themselves, between September 1978 and March 1979, to three compositions that should be understood as a whole since they share the same research and vision of sound, independent from any form of language: *Motore immobile*, *L’Egitto prima delle sabbie*, and *Rappel*.

*Motore immobile* by Pio (completed in October 1978) was released only in 1979 to avoid overlapping with the release of *L’Egitto prima delle sabbie* by Battiato (September 1978), while *Rappel* (registered by Pio with SIAE in March 1979) remained unreleased. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that Cramps Music & Miraloop now present the release of *Rappel*, 45 years after its creation.

*Rappel* is a composition for piano and magnetic tape lasting about 15 minutes. It is a variation of the musical idea already explored by Battiato and Pio in both *L’Egitto prima delle sabbie* and *Ananta* (Motore Immobile), enhanced in this case by the use of two Revox tape recorders, which at the time were a new technology. The second Revox was specifically purchased by Battiato for the creation of *Rappel*. Battiato explained how the tapes were recorded: "I would interpolate the compositions using the Revox, a tape machine I had painstakingly mastered as a self-taught user." In *Rappel*, the harmonics from the piano were captured by the two connected Revox recorders in a loop, with the result overlapping the sounds of the pianist/performer. "It’s hard to imagine the results due to the complex iterations," Franco wrote in the notes for *Rappel*. This composition pays particular attention to harmonics and resonances we often overlook—though they are the essence of sound itself. These harmonics have the power to dismantle the space-time cage created by our mental conditioning and the acoustic distractions of codified musical language. The harmonics echo ethereally over a sea of metaphorical sand and reminiscences from the ancient world, custodians of knowledge obscured by the decay of morality (Kali Yuga). Giusto Pio: "Battiato encouraged me to release my first album, which was experimental music. The title was *Motore immobile*... Afterward, we also recorded another album, which remained unreleased, with a piece called *Rappel*. Both works can be placed in the post-avant-garde movement, exploring the experimental search for new sounds. Both *Ananta* and *Rappel* are terms and concepts from the philosophical and esoteric doctrine of the Greek/Armenian mystic Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff (on life, the soul, and the universe), and the teachings of his student Henry Thomasson, whom Franco and I, during that time, attended... The uniform, continuous sound (also including piano scales/fugues) leading to dissolution in silence was meant, in my intention, to prepare for introspection and the search for transcendental realities."

*ALLA CORTE DI NEFERTITI, 1988*

In the civilization of ancient Egypt, whose influences fascinated Battiato and Giusto Pio, the sonic origin of space/time and the manifest world was expressed in the word *name*, represented graphically with the hieroglyph of the Mouth (R) placed next to that of the Waters (N): the action of the vital breath of the creative Mouth on the waters of an ocean still still and undifferentiated. The Egyptian abyss of Nun-Nunet is that primordial ocean that Giusto Pio, in reference to Vedic spirituality, has always sought to evoke, starting with *Ananta*, a track from the *Motore Immobile* vinyl. Giusto Pio: "When, at the end of the ’80s, I returned from Milan to Castelfranco Veneto, slowing down my activities alongside Franco, I resumed studying, composing, and creating new sounds with the help of frequency modulation equipment, spanning almost from the origins to the most recent perspectives in sound."

*Alla Corte di Nefertiti* was composed in 1988 and marks my return to sound experimentation, which forms the basis of *Motore immobile*, but here in a less stylized and raw form. In my intention, it is a sort of journey into the unconscious, inspired by the deep, profound impressions and emotions I experienced when attending meetings with Franco and Thomasson and trying to look inside myself. Musically, I wanted each part to have a different rhythm, so that, like in my recent *Dolomiti Suite*, it feels like the music is flying, taking on a circular movement, conveying a sense of instability. Milo Bianca, an abstract painter whom I greatly admire, created six large panels inspired by this album." "It was Franco who financed the release of *Alla Corte di Nefertiti* through his publishing house, L’Ottava. The title is not only my homage to *L’Egitto prima delle sabbie*, but also connected to the research on sonorities that Franco pursued in that composition, and which was also the field I was moving through since my early exercises." The subtitle of the composition (later dropped at the time of its release in 1988) was: "Astral counterpoints in frequencies and colors in time. Each color observes its own metronomic value, autonomous yet in harmonic symbiosis." A direct line, therefore, connects *Alla Corte di Nefertiti* to the artistic experiences of Giusto Pio and Franco Battiato in 1978 and the creation of the two works *L’Egitto prima delle sabbie* and *Motore immobile*.

*MEDEA, 1991*

The *MeDea* suite (1991) was written by Giusto Pio for the theater company "Krypton," specializing in avant-garde works. As always during those years, it was the result of the continuous ideological exchange and musical experimentation between Pio and Battiato, creators of numerous experimental compositions. Giusto Pio: "In 1991, I was involved in another interesting theatrical project with Krypton, a company from Florence that mainly works with lighting and is specialized in luministic effects to 'go to the heart of the theatrical word' (the following year, in 1992, they took care of the lighting and electronic visualizations for Franco’s opera-oratorio *Gilgamesh*). This time it was a Greek tragedy, *MeDea*, reworked by Marco Palladini from Euripides, directed by Giancarlo Cauteruccio, and presented as part of a theatrical performance competition. They gave me the text with indications of where sound interventions were needed, and I wrote a series of musical fragments, which were well received, and for which I was awarded the prize for best musical commentary. What I liked most were the lighting solutions invented by the group: for example, when Medea kills her children, she moves on stage among columns of light, highlighted by dust, as if she were in a temple; at one point, she stops, no longer screaming in fury and despair, holding a glass prism, and from the back of the hall, a laser beam shines through the prism, reflecting like a knife blade, reverberating around and even into the sky, with red light like blood." The musical commentary for *MeDea* is divided into 17 scenes or sound interventions of varying lengths, which Pio conceived also as forms of colors and abstract images: not by chance, the opera's libretto was accompanied by preparatory paintings drawn by the author himself, seen as a means of reaching the intended sonic result. Giusto Pio: "On the other hand, music and painting are for me not only contiguous arts but in some way identical, interchangeable in the sense that I perceive music as form and color. Therefore, I would define my drawings and paintings as 'reverberations' of the music. What is reverberation? It is not the echo of a sound when it repeats within a large, enclosed space, like in a valley; reverberation is another sound that is born, lasting a few seconds. Well, when I play, compose, or listen to music, I perceive around me reverberations of these sounds, which I have tried to visualize in these shapes, in these drawings." Franco Battiato: "His painting, which could be called musical, generates sounds that he represents in waveforms. He imagines colors, as Olivier Messiaen did, and in some ways, it reminds me of Henri Michaux's work on vibrations." In *MeDea*, "The chorus, from being a powerless commentator on the action, becomes the exhorter, the suggester of the rites of initiation, starting with the formulaic verses of the 'Tibetan Book of the Dead'. For the ritual to be completed, and for the woman to transform from a sorceress into a goddess, she must free herself from the affections and feelings that led to the murderous act..." (Marco Caporali, *MeDea* 1991).

*A.D.A.M UBI ES, 1993*

A.D.A.M. Ubi Es is the acronym for "Anima dell’anima mia, dove sei" ("Soul of my soul, where are you?"). We wanted to include this composition in the double vinyl because, in the final years of his long career, the author enjoyed pairing it with *Alla Corte di Nefertiti*.

Ramana Maharshi (1879–1950), the great Indian mystic who lived at the foot of the sacred Arunachala mountain in Tamil Nadu (India), wrote: "Therefore, let this body be set aside as if it were truly a corpse. Do not mutter 'I', but with enthusiasm seek what it is that now shines inside the heart as 'I'. Beneath the incessant flow of the most varied thoughts, arises in the heart the constant, uninterrupted awareness, silent and spontaneous, as 'I of the I'."The point of reference is the timeless being, whose presence is revealed in the sound/vibration, which constitutes the immediate physical event, pure and gratuitous. Just as light splits into the frequencies of colors and sound into concurrent harmonics, so being blooms in the differentiation of its living functions, which substantiate themselves flowing through all forms of experience. Living forms, which in reflective, logical/analytical thinking, are held separate, ordered, classified, rigid. But since creativity can renew itself where there is relationship, any separative attitude contradicts its spontaneous flow and inhibits its fertility. However, this generative power remains always available, beyond the barriers that individual consciousness constructs to preserve and endure, even in ways conforming to its constitutive temporality.

An archetypal reference to the power of sound cannot fail to reconnect with the generative value of that dynamic order of harmonic relationships between magnitudes through which the original specifies itself, differentiating in the prism of manifestation: for by this way, the supersensible becomes sensible, suggesting the possibility of returning to the origin along the reverse path. The *Ubi Es* present in the track's title warns that it should be sought in the depth of the Self, which transcends every manifestation.
Pio and Battiato's research is experimental, but always remains faithful to sound, to its birth free from concepts or meanings, connecting directly with the soul of the listener as well as their own; it never loses touch, in a continuous and renewed exchange with the audience, from which still emanates the great aura of affection surrounding their memory. In 2000, *A.D.A.M. Ubi Es* was granted by the author as a sound commentary for the art exhibition by Bruno Gripari entitled *Le vie dell’oro* ("The Paths of Gold").

*THE DOUBLE VINYL "KUM", 2024*

By Andrea Buranello, Emanuele Fraschini, Stefano Pio.
KUM is the root of many Aramaic and Greek words that lead to the original meaning of "to rise again by finding the resources within oneself."
Listening to the works of Giusto Pio and/or Franco Battiato is not like looking in the rearview mirror to see what we’ve left behind. It’s something else!
It means retracing those years full of invention, fervor, and hope, but also understanding the culture and expressive languages of that period, recalling where we come from, and, most importantly, seeing the direction in which we are heading. The paths taken by Pio and Battiato, sometimes complementary and sometimes symmetric, led the two artists to undertake “Intertwined Paths” from which contemporary, hypnotic, and surprising tracks emerged. Chain-linked tape recorders and overlapping instruments in bold and futuristic experiments are still something amazing and unusual today. Digital reverbs and samplers, which today reproduce every type of effect, timbre, and sound, did not exist at the time the tracks featured in this double vinyl were conceived.
However, the musicality of Pio and Battiato remains extraordinary: already with a first listen, one realizes the daring harmonic progressions and how their artistic union was complementary not only on the technical level (τέχνη) but also on the human level in the noblest sense of the term, which translates to the unconditional search for the good of the other (ἀγάπη).
The tonal balance of the tracks recorded on magnetic tape is solid, compact, fluid, and enveloping. Giusto Pio's pieces raise questions that do not always find answers in what is already known, but also contain many images channeled in the additive synthesis of the waveforms of the Hammond (an electromechanical organ designed by Laurens Hammond) or in more daring instrumental passages.
In the compositions, there is a palpable sense of wanting to take risks, to navigate unexplored waters.
Music becomes a space where fantasies are freed, a desire to know and understand things. Pio and Battiato were like Magellan: they explored new, mysterious routes with otherness, and despite this, they instilled in listeners enthusiasm, trust, and security in facing musical territories that had never been traversed before.
Listening to their tracks generates new, unusual, but also positive sensations, because in them one perceives research, precision, reflection, as well as care and attention for the other, as well as delicacy in the contact. Songs and musical experiments are living creatures, leaving traces inside us.

Recent studies have revealed how music and the words contained within it are powerful arrows that hit specific targets in each of our minds: in this way, they become instruments that alter the brain.

Giusto Pio likely already sensed this incredible potential; the warning on the cover of his historic album *Motore Immobile*: “it is advised to listen at a moderate volume,” confirms how the author wanted to "care" for the listener, not just release a musical product on the market.

Let us not be under the illusion that we can sing or produce beautiful sounds if they are not accompanied by deep emotional participation: only this motivation creates bridges between the reality each of us lives in and the reality (and solitude) of others. Giusto Pio and Franco Battiato were telling the world what the world needed to "hear."
And listening to their tracks (this album also contains two unreleased gems by Pio) helps us resist the storms of time, but most importantly, makes us all aware dreamers, intent on grasping, with the necessary attention, the emotions that sounds, but also silences, wish to communicate to us.
Because only in dreams are men happy: this has always been the case, and the reality of our times makes us think that, probably, it always will be.

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