The program notes for Audiodrome, an album including four orchestral pieces by Fausto Romitelli, would not tend inspire the general listening public to eagerly pop this disc into the CD player: quotes describing the music's "excess and aggressive hypersaturation," in which "the most minute shift can lead to bad painting, the most splendidly precious colours can be splattered with tar and the traditional paintbrush alternate with a Magic Marker or can of spray paint," or, especially, the assertion that "the language of music here is like a disease that gets worse because it causes lesions and its figures are symptoms or wounds." To claim that these quotes don't in fact resonate to some extent with the character of the music would be disingenuous, but for the intrepid listener who doesn't always require audio experiences to be evocative of sylvan glades, Romitelli's depiction of post-industrial dystopia is pretty compelling. The fact is that Romitelli (who died in 2004 at the age of 41) had a fantastically fertile imagination, a strong grasp of the ways musical structure can drive a work's emotional impact, and he was a brilliant orchestrator. In spite of Romitelli's relentlessly aggressive manner and what some might perceive as the rebarbative nature of his imagery, there is not a dull moment on this CD. His musical language was most strongly influenced by the French spectralists, but he allowed himself a broad, hyper-expressionist palette of kaleidoscopically shifting soundscapes unbeholden to any particular aesthetic philosophy or tradition. Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale dell RAI, conducted by
Peter Rundel, gives searing, impassioned performances. This CD should be of strong interest to fans of in-your-face, eclectic postmodernism.