Professor Bad Trip by Fausto Romitelli

I went to this concert I was talking about of Ictus ensemble last Friday (Professor Bad Trip of Fausto Romitelli) and I can only recommend to anybody reading these lines to listen to this piece. It is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of contemporary music. It is very strong, never boring or pretentious as contemporary music can sometimes be, filled with a “dry sadness”, a sadness which is never pathetic, and often nasty (esp. the cello solo, very beautifully played by François Deppe). Jean-Luc Plouvier (one of the pianists of Ictus) told me that it is certainly the best album of them (and only 12 euros on the site of the excellent Cypres Records). They worked on it for months and together with Romitelli. It is the last album by Ictus that Romitelli could hear before his death (and from what I was told, he was extremely happy with the result). During the concert, I thought that if progressive contemporary music exists, then Professor Bad Trip pertains to this genre. It is a bit like the first Pink Floyd album of classical music. The presence of the electric guitar (sometimes played with distortions) certainly explains it partly. And in fact, this impression was justified, since Plouvier explained me after the concert that Romitelli called this piece after a famous hippie comics from the seventies in Italy (see the drawing above) by
Gianluca Lerici, whose best known comics is an adaptation of William Burroughs’ ‘Naked Lunch’ (‘Il Pasto Nudo’). Professor Bad Trip was also inspired by the poetry of the Belgian writer and painter Henri Michaux and esp. his works on mescaline and other psychedelic substances. And it’s true that the drawing of Michaux above resembles a bit Professor Bad Trip. The drawing below is by him.

Ictus Ensemble in Stuttgart today

The Ictus Ensemble is an Ensemble playing contemporary music born in Bruxelles. They play today in Stuttgart the piece “Professor Bad Trip” from the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli. Some extracts of this ’spectralist’ piece can be listened here (to the right somewhere).

Ictus Ensemble plays with Rosas, the company of Teresa de Keersmaeker based in Bruxelles. Among the members of Ictus are the pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps (below) and the violonist Georg van Dam.

Manon filmed van Dam playing a sonate of Bartok in “presto perfect sound” (2006). According to Bartok, this piece should be played in 6 minutes, but Manon told me that it is so hard to play that it is almost impossible to make it so short (but apparently, van Dam managed to)