Italian Minimalism

Backpacking and Breathing Deep over the Empty Center of Motore Immobile + Further Listening Suggestions

Back in January, I received an email from artist/ composer Gryphon Rue saying that he was going to be staging a performance of Giusto Pio’s 1978 album, Motore Immobile with a small ensemble and would I be interested in coming. “I thought you might be into it,” he wrote. An understatement, to be sure. It’s an album I once deemed a “towering beacon of Italian minimalism and one of the most sumptuous ambient albums of any era,” when –some twenty years after I first encountered it– I had the occasion to review for Pitchfork. Just read the review knowing that in every way it’s a perfect 10 for me.

Last night, a trio comprised of Rue (on Hammond organ), Benjamin Katz (on Farfisa and piano), and violinist Odetta Hartman performed Motore Immobile at Roulette. I can’t imagine it’s really ever been performed live, even during Pio’s own lifetime. It was sparsely attended, but those in the audience were lifted to a higher place. And my mind drifted back to my long history with the composition.

I can still envision the CD spine for Motore Immobile now in my old roommate’s collection when we lived together in the mid-’90s. D is to this day a legend in underground circles, a longtime champion of noise tapes, mail art, and avant garde explorations of all stripes. He published ND Magazine for many years (incidentally the first place I had a byline). You should hit up his store next time you’re in Austin. Maybe I recognized the Cramps label because it had also released John Cage and Robert Ashley albums, but there were only two pieces on the disc, so I decided it was worth a spin.

It was love at first note, “Motore Immonile” and “Ananta” resonating so deeply within me that it can still hypnotize me decades later. It’s that profound a piece. I can assure you that folks like Floating Points, Jim O’Rourke, Oren Ambarchi, Sunn O))), Keith Fullerton Whitman, Arp, and the like are also reverent fans of this music.

In the year 2000, I backpacked around Europe, making space for a few precious mixtapes in my pack. One was for sleeping, the first track a demo of the Who’s “Pure and Easy,” and its line: “There once was a note pure and easy/ Playing so free like a breath rippling by/ The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me.” That carried over to the blast of a major C chord on two church organs, the pure and easy note that ushers in the sublime 17 minutes of Pio’s “Motore Immobile.”

It never failed to slow and deepen my breath and usher me off to a dreamstate. The piece itself takes its measure and pacing from breath, the result of the long wordless tones by vocalist Martin Kleist (which Gryphon informed me is an alias of Franco Battiato). It’s so subtle and intimate, it’s ASMR decades before ASMR became a sound concept. It draws you in, your breath becoming slower and slower, and before you know it, the cosmos breathes with you. I went to sleep to it for many months, in many different countries, more often than not being pulled right back out when that C chord sounds once more in its waning moments, coming full circle. Heaven was instead just a hostel bed. “Motore Immobile” remains as much a landmark of my trip as visiting the Eiffel Tower, the Sistine Chapel, the Cinque Terre coastline, or the lasting memories and friendships.

And then 17 years later, my newly expanded family took a holiday to Italy, one last trip before the end of maternity leave for my wife, the type of suggestions all seasoned parents give to new parents, travel before your baby starts crawling and becomes much harder to handle. It was the same month I wrote that Pitchfork review, so I would play Motore Immobile while driving through the undulating sun-glow hills of Tuscany, the 17 minutes of the title piece sounding the way. It’s no doubt why I compared the music to Italian cuisine, where the simplicity of tomatoes, olives, salt, and harvested wheat can convey all the splendors of the earth. Music made from church organ, quivering horsehair, and the human breath allowed one to “experience something more celestial.”

Without really knowing it, I intuited there was a deeply spiritual basis for the work, which the program bear out. (Shout out to Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran for the excellent notes.) Motore Immobile is named for Aristotle’s concept of a “prime mover” or “motionless engine,” the empty center of the wheel that creates all the subsequent motion of the universe. Lao Tzu had a similar conception of the Tao some three hundred years prior.

The other piece, “Ananta” relates back to Sanskrit and its concept of endlessness, boundlessness. Italian philosopher Gianluca Magi wrote of this music: “It is like penetrating inside a Sri Yantra, the Indian visual tool meant to foster the process of meditative absorption…that still point –neither flesh nor fleshless, neither arrest nor movement where past and future are gathered– that center around which the world turns and dances.” But ever the diligent Italian, Pio explored all of these ancient religions and yet remained a Catholic. As the cover’s cross attests to.

It was a small miracle to be able to witness a live performance of Motore Immobile and I learned Rue devoted many months to reverse engineering the composition and creating a score for it. He told me he practiced the piece every day for months, no small feat in that as I could see in a live setting, the focus on both breath and when to shift the triads was intense.

The illusion of stillness has many movements, it turns out. I’m guessing that because Alvin Curran is thanked in the program, he may have shed some light on how the original piece came to be. Both organists used stop watches to get the timing of the piece exact, then over the course of a few months, then slowly weened themselves off the machinations of that time towards a more subtle sense of time. Each component moves like a breath, the same yet always changing in extremely subtle ways. Rue, Katz, and Hartman performed beautifully, mindfully. Their intention brought the piece to life, their hard work and months of practice making it all seem so simple and motionless.

Further Italian minimalist recommendations behind the paywall: