Nurse With Wound List alert! Nurse With Wound List alert!
This is my personal favorite when it comes to Rocchi’s oeuvre. I brought this to a record listening party shortly after I procured it in 2011 and it turned most of the heads in the room, or at least all of those who weren’t too drunk to notice. In the world of Italian prog, Rocchi’s name (at least in my experience) doesn’t garner as much lofty praise as…say…Battiato, but his studio albums (especially the trio of Essenza, the one posted yesterday, and Il Miele Dei Pianeti Le Isole Le Api) are brilliant. When Rocchi passed away on the 18th of June this year, the world lost an incredibly talented, sadly-unheralded artist.
The venerable Mutant-Sounds blog says:
“Beginning on a tide of oscillating harmonium drone and plangent vocalizing, Essenza opens deep chasms into the roiling psyche of it’s creator, evident even to those like me with zero grasp of the Italian language. This particular third eye-opening Italian cosmic-folk-prog outing (Rocchi’s fouth) comes courtesy of a one-time member of Stormy Six and operates in the grand tradition of folk-inflected higher key Italian head music of the era, glancing particularly off of tendencies established or later elaborated on by Alan Sorrenti, Franco Battiato, Lucio Battisti and Mauro Pelosi, with flute-y folkloric passages melting into string drones that in turn morph into bongo driven acid folk with the phaser set to 10. Ravishing and not to be missed.”
Claudio Rocchi
Essenza
(Ariston, 1973)
MediaFire DL Link
01. Essenza
02. Sono Un Uomo
03. È Per Te [MP3]
04. Radici E Semi
05. Templi E Mercati
06. Il Passo Da Fare
07. Per Sciogliere Un Fiocco
