In order to illustrate this predominant structural/spiritual character of the audiovisual constitution of An Index of Metals, I shall look at some sec­tions which fulfill different typical formal functions in the work:

• Introduzione;
• Hellucination 1: Drowningirl, representing the most substantial sec­tions;
• Secondo Intermezzo, and Adagio with Quarto Intermezzo, as exam­ples of the minor intervening sections;
• Finale with Cadenza.

In view of its brevity and relative simplicity, but also because – coming at the beginning of the work – it stands as an immediate declaration of intent, the Introduzione provides an excellent exemplification of the extent to which An Index of Metals favours processes of densification (corroborated in this case, as we have seen, by inter-media synchronization). The musical form of this piece consists entirely in the progressively varied repetition of a single element (a famous objet trouvé of contemporary pop culture): the beginning of Shine on You Crazy Diamond sampled from the Pink Floyd vinyl LP. Each time this element is repeated, interspersed with long pauses, it is overlaid with an or­chestral figure which at first conforms perfectly and then becomes increasingly distorted and invasive: the figure begins as a straightforward G minor chord, to which quartertone and semitone distortions are gradually added, getting further and further from the model (realising what Gérard Grisey, speaking of Romitelli, referred to as 'spectralisme barbare'). The durations also undergo a gradual process in the form of a parabola: for a lengthy interval the sample is extended while the pauses get shorter; then finally – with a striking effect of figural thickening and concitato – the pauses get shorter and shorter until they are eliminated, while the expositions of the sample also get shorter (according to the following scheme of durations, expressed to the nearest second; sample : 4'', 5'', 8'', 9'', 10'', 10'', 11'', 12'', 12'', 11'', 10'', 9'', 6'', 7''; intervening pauses: 16'', 14'', 8'', 7'', 7'', 6'', 5'', 2'', 3'', 0'', 1'', 0'', 0''). In the video a similar process occurs involving a simple quantitative temporal increase in the appearances of the reference image: a grey circle appearing on a dark screen in which faint whi­tish traces begin to rotate slowly (a form suited to an introduction since it is still barely articulated). This densification is achieved by the acceleration of the editing, roughly corresponding to the scheme of the musical durations, and also by the progressive imposition and multiplication of the image on the three screens. Thus we see that the combination of cyclic structure and distortion, which is characteristic of all Romitelli’s mature production (Arbo 2005b), is present in An Index of Metals not only on the musical plane.

In Hellucination 1: Drowningirl all the media contribute to the repre­sentation of a slow, gradual and inexorable fall: the verbal text by means of conventional explicit signification; the video by means of almost abstract images, which however were duly elaborated (as ‘snapshots’) and edited (in the sequence chosen), to allude to a reality; and the music by analogy or structural isomorphism with the chosen element of reality. How does this multimedia ‘drowning’ come about? The key is provided by the perfectly transparent poetic text, which in turn is a comment on Roy Lichtenstein’s picture Drowning Girl (1963 – Museum of Modern Art, New York). In the video, the images pass from an initial condition in which the metal is barely present as mere appearance, a steely gleam in the celestial vast, to subse­quent stages in which it gradually takes on colour, heat (0' 54'') and mass (2' 16''), until it becomes earthy (4' 50''), almost organic even (6' 22''), and vis­ceral (6' 45''), tracing the whole symbolic arc from the sublime to the basest. In the music the melody in the voice lingers with a predominantly stepwise movement on the same pitch set (none other than a D minor scale) and on descending chromaticisms, while the ensemble pursues a cyclical spiralling movement (over a bass in an almost diatonic D minor mode) which in ap­pearance – literally impossible, but conjured up by the part writing and underscored by the prevailing glissando figure – is always descending (in Drowningirl II and Drowningirl III too the prevailing trend of the melodic movement is descending, and made particularly striking by glissandi and chromaticisms).

In the music of the Secondo Intermezzo there is a gradual mutation of an electronic sample (taken from the repertoire of the group Pan Sonic) in its al­most exclusively rhythmic and timbric dimensions. At first the sample seems merely to repeat itself cyclically, but subsequently it undergoes what is clearly a processual distortion. In the video an analogous phenomenon occurs in the Adagio in conjunction with the Quarto Intermezzo. The two sections are com­bined so as to perform all the more effectively the function of a preparatory lull prior to the following section, Hellucination 2/3: Risingirl/Earpiercingbells, which on the musical plane is the expressive culmination of the whole work (this involves a mechanism common to all the arts, consisting in the insertion of a tranquil digression prior to the ‘catastrophe’, ensuring that the overall process of intensification is not entirely straightforward and predictable). Here drops of mercury appear on the screens – aggregating, disintegrating, in transformation – in ever increasing numbers, at ever greater speeds and with increasing synchronization between the three screens, until arriving at virtual saturation.

The one stark exception to the non-representative nature of the video component in An Index of Metals comes in the last scene, Cadenza, which portrays an enormous waste disposal utility-cement mixer where moun­tains of rubbish are continuously rotated. In this case too a degree of abstraction is achieved, not so much in the specific instant as in the diach­ronic scheme: the sequence is mounted as a series of loops and rendered cyclical and alien as if in a poetic echo of the fundamentally entropic cyc­licity typical of Romitelli’s style. Once the music has reached its climax in Hellucination 2/3: Risingirl/Earpiercingbells, it is the video which has to maintain the level of existential density during the few remaining minutes. This fragment is collocated in a work which otherwise keeps any tangible personal or collective experience at arm’s length, and may perhaps allude – combining the conclusion in formal terms with the rubbish in terms of content – to the fate of humans and of all things. In the immediately pre­ceding Finale the music had come to a certain harmonic and figural closure, returning – with a corresponding effect of repose – to the chord of G minor which served as the 'home' sonority in the Introduzione. But the Cadenza contradicts any apparent pacification: the music starts up again with a noisy rhapsody on electric guitar and bass (recycling a piece from Romitelli’s Trash Tv Trance, 2002), while the video – following the shav­ings, flakes and blowtorch fusion in the Finale – actually represents trash itself. The symbolism is perfectly evident: even what, being cyclical, seems capable of go on immutably for ever is actually subject to degradation; even metal, the form of matter that seems most solid and incorruptible, deteri­orates, not unlike the human frame. Thus also at the macroformal level An Index of Metals reveals the processuality we identified at the level of the individual sections, and tends, in fact, to entropy. If the work is simulta­neously an abstract and an all too concrete “requiem for matter” (Pachini 2011), this emerges in its overall temporal span and its multimedia inte­grality.

The category of corruption proves to be essential in interpreting An Index of Metals (and in Romitelli’s poetics in general) in another sense too: not as a process but as an atemporal conceptual opposition, between what is pure and what is impure or spurious (at various levels). Romitelli and Pachini play the opposites off not only separately but also, more interestingly, as terms in a continuum. In the music this can be seen in the antithesis/synthesis between harmony which is either harmonic (tonal or spectral) or inharmonic (using chromaticisms, quarter tones, out of tune notes); between timbre which is ei­ther clear and clean or dirty, rough, grainy; between traditional acoustic instrumentation and its modern counterpart which is amplified, electric, elec­tronic (including the voice); between the classic academic manner and popular styles (rock, psychedelic). In the video, between the raw material of the filming and its elaboration and digital photographic deformation; between metal in its inalterable, mint state and fractures, corrosions, fusions, oxidizations; between clearcut, geometric lines and irregular, confused, magmatic forms; between the immaterial abstract and the material concrete; between the inorganic cha­racter of the first 47 minutes and the last 3 minutes of trash. In Lèkovich’s text ‘metal-miso’, ‘infected’, ‘corroded’, ‘incinerate’, ‘intoxicate’ and so on are enun­ciated. On the aesthetic plane the multimedia admixture itself can be interpreted as corruption: of pure, ‘absolute’ music with the extraneous media of language and above all of video. The theatre has always been the venue in which music loses its purity (whether structural, stylistic, semiotic or social), and it is no coincidence if An Index of Metals was described as a ‘video-opera’ by its authors.