Video: Franco Battiato: Centro di Gravità Permanente

Franco Battiato started his career in the late '60s as a struggling, middle-of-the-road Italian pop singer; by the early '70s he had undergone a radical transformation into avant-garde dabbler, creating spacey music (ostensibly) inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krautrock and Brian Eno. One of his most outr albums featured an entire side of him playing a single piano chord over and over. Although folks such as Jim O'Rourke and Julian Cope are wont to name-drop Battiato nowadays, at the time his experimental records weren't winning him much praise or monetary reward; so by the '80s Battiato re-invened himself as an Italian [...]