Le Balcon

Fausto Romitelli (1963-2004)
Professor Bad Trip, lesson I, II & III

In Michaux's writings and drawings, I found correlations between the “depraved perspectives” of mescaline and the sonic territories that have always fascinated me: the mechanics of appearance, transformation and disappearance of visions and colors are very close to the forms of my auditory imagination.

I therefore felt it necessary to work on the musical aspects most directly linked to the perception of the phenomena described by Michaux.

What prevails in Professor Bad Trip is the hypnotic, ritualistic aspect, the taste for the deformed and artificial: obsessive repetition, continuous and insistent acceleration of materials and time, twisted and distorted to saturation, white noise and catastrophe, a constant drift towards chaos, objects named and already liquefied; unbearable speed and density; aborted or interrupted journeys, or brutally predictable ones, like the trajectory of a missile; journeys that go nowhere, false trajectories, false movement; unnatural colors, unphysiological times; sometimes a sudden, paradoxical silence, crossed by enigmatic images and, in the distance, a hallucinatory calm, soundscapes that may be tranquil but are sinister, threatening. The calculation is there, and it's rigorous, but its purpose is to organize the excesses of a hypertrophic writing style that lets loose in hysterical outbursts, unbalanced situations, exaggeratedly predictable, even unpredictable. These are the questionable teachings of Professor Bad Trip, who obviously loves psychedelic and progressive rock, and the avant-garde of the techno universe.

First performed by Le Balcon on February 24, 2012 at Église Saint-Merry. 
Recorded on November 9, 2020 as part of the Festival Singer-Polignac.