LOGOS ensemble - Radio Zapping

Logos ensemble presents Radio Zapping, a performance where live and virtual sound, reality and dream, irony and drama merge and take an original shape.
The sequence of musical and stage events can be compared with an unpredictable and eventful travelling with us: he is not considered as a "cult personality" but as a remarkable inspiration source.
He gives rise to an endless search of ideas and musical paths.
Logos ensemble wants to pay tribute to Frank Zappa and Radio Zapping means to be a light, close and sometimes ironic memory of this great artist.
The title, Radio Zapping, recalls effectively every part of the show: the Radio, Frank Zappa, the lively rhythm and the variety of the programme, which is itself another distinctive element.
Logos ensemble and the Radio play a game, a counterpoint where you cannot easily recognise the border between the real and the virtual sound line. The performance starts with the typical radio tuning sounds ending on the Radio Zapping programme where we find the Logos ensemble playing on stage.
The live performance is enriched with enchanting lights as well as animated by theatrical events, such as gangs, unexpected and sudden events, music and scene changes. The whole show is faster and faster without any break.

Logos ensemble gives a different colour to every piece elaborating and developing the music up to creating new compositions. Therefore the musicians are not just interpreters but become composers of their performance.

Performance's ideation by
Cristiano Becherucci

Music by
Frank Zappa, Igor Stravinsky, Charles Mingus, Fabrizio De Rossi Re, Leonardo Gensini, Edgar Varese.

Arrangements and original Compositions
Cristiano Becherucci, Eugenio Becherucci, Fabrizio De Rossi Re,

Riccardo Fassi, Leonardo Gensini.

Stage-direction and Lights
Domenico De Martino

Sound's Elaboration
Pier Luigi Coggio

Artistic Direction
Antonio Becherucci

Gianfranco Cellacchi flute, Luigi Maiozzi clarinet, Davide Grottelli sax, Diego Conti violin, Paolo Capasso violoncello and electric bass, Eugenio Becherucci classic and electric guitars, Cristiano Becherucci keyboards, Riccardo Fassi piano and keyboards, Marco Malagola drums and percussion.

Expressive Short Circuits

Up to a few years ago, nobody could have conceived a programme of a concert putting together a 1900 master, a contemporary music-writer, a jazz double-bass player and a rock guitar virtuoso. We are not totally used to this kind of things yet, but groups like Kronos, Balanescu, or in this case LOGOS ensemble, seem to tell us that this isn't a faraway possibility or a funny provocation anymore.
Thanks to LOGOS' performers too we are the audience of a wealthy cultural change which goes definitely to interfere with the stone-like still history of music in our century.
Nowadays we can't and we don't want to constrict music in a lot of solipsistic, different worlds; the last generation of musicians - grown up between music

academies and rock events - could witness how fragile the division into genders is, and lean on the experience of a number of noble predecessors in this discovery, from Debussy and his love for gamelan to Luigi Nono finding an unpredictable resemblance between his music and Jimi Hendrix'.
Most of the musical expressive realities which nowadays come to light are meant to be pointed at as simply artistic, simply bearing cultural, human and aesthetics values not necessarily through a high language and traditional, academic means.
Frank Zappa is an absolutely meaningful character when put in this frame. He was a self-taught musician provided with a rich amount of technical and theoretical knowledge, used to move in the rock'n'roll circus while feeding his cult for Varèse and Stravinskij, set thousands of rock performances and achieved the privilege of his music directed by Mehta and Boulez, attended every kind of musical form as naively as an out-caste, but cynically enough not to believe in it in too deep. He was at the same time a solid music artist, and the music "perfect stranger".
Actually, there is no idea of fitting the aim, or suiting the form, in Zappa's music. For this reason we can define his creative proposal a delirium and his music "uncomfortable". Actually, the very idea of musical gender is uncomfortable when applied to Z.'s production, for it loses its original purposes and comes under the naked light of a mere, out of time cliché. The style exercises born out of Z.'s unprejudiced use of trends and techniques are the sign of occasional short circuits among different expressive worlds. Zappa focused on a number of generally cultural and specifically musical common places which crowded the very first period of his career (the 60's and the 70's): structuralism, the hippie wave, pop-art, social criticism, anarchism, jazz, electroacoustic music, and much more. In this expressive melting pot, wizard Z. created his formula by comparing this set of materials in his peculiar critical way, and grotesquely proceeded by taking the dust out of the stars.
What we got is a bunch of low-tone concrete-electronic collages, stereotype darmstadtian sounds, feulleiton-style songs, false aristocratic writings, instrumental inability, all of this introduced as a chaos: it is clear that this chaos is conceived, realised and governed as an absolutely coherent and making sense whole.

Zappa says...

LOGOS' ideal plan takes much of its strength by Zappa's master-class.
This approach immediate consequence leads to an open artistic form which can differently appear, and be differently received.
The LOGOS performance can fit a superficial will, by its glimmering outer side, and can satisfy the exigency of the connoisseur, for its deeper and complex undercover. The show appearance of easiness and its opening to a composite audience seems to be the most intriguing pixel of this LOGOS' work.
The Zapping theme, which occurs as a kind of structural leitmotiv during the whole performing time, works as the glue of the various sounds and images, and stands as the ultimate metaphor of the creative thought quickness, where creative goes back to its original meaning of "apprehending unpredictable links between apparently distant things, concepts or ideas". It also covers a peculiar poetic value by remanding to the radio, the prime and self-defined technologic machine.

The performance is conceived so that the spectator could fall and live for ninety minutes in kind of a funny and amazing microcosms, nearly a war scenario broken by a chilly Ohm, by mysterious Tibetan Bells, where silly and humorous sampled noises underline sound and body acts, in and off screen voices, suddenly diverted by the reassuring home-like smell of a ding-dong ring; and where the audience is left to hang for the clown to sneeze or to toss himself about behind a buzzing fly.
These incoherent images get framed into a finest stylistic, musical and theatrical shape.
Both the spectators coming from sound rock or classical music won't be let down by this curious choice of cutting an unheard and complex compromise between the two backgrounds.
During the show the LOGOS' performers set an unconsciousness dimension up, a kind of vertigo caused by this whirl of sounds and scenes that builds a unitary organism, but without an already experienced centre for the audience to lean on.

Good Morning, LOGOS
it's a lazy Sunday morning, I just woke up,... I want to send to you my greetings...
I still want to bless you for yesterday night performance at the Acquario!
We were really missing such a show... divertissement serving intelligence and new music... I feel this purpose of yours is an important and brand new step on the path of contemporary music...an earthquake able to break the old rules, to re-build new ones on a solid base...I mean, I'm a LOGOS' fan...gee, I guess it's clear...
thank you for involving me in this extraordinary adventure.. I've been a lucky one...thanks a lot, to all of you..
Fabrizio De Rossi Re, composer

Shake Yer Mind,
Here's the LOGOS
The show is really out of the rules and uneasy for almost everyone, from those into rock to the ones loving intellectual music, for it represents no music gender at all. It rather gives a 1900's music vision, through Zappa's imagery, and above all through LOGOS's prospective... it's a dynamic, living vision, not a watertight compartments classification...
Michele Dall'Ongaro, composer, musicologist and RAI journalist.

Logos' Musicians
Become Mimes For Zappa
Get rid of the bow-ties, stripped off the black jackets, and in a spotlights' parade, here it comes, instead of a concert suit, a scoundrel shirt with Frank Zappa written on in capital letters. The nine LOGOS' performers wanted to split, to undouble, to multiply. And so it happened, for they turned into actors, mimes, acrobats, stand-up comics under the audience's half-astonished and half-curious eyes. This isn't an everyday practice in the bubbling but somewhat reserved contemporary music world. No one but Zappa could sponsor this metamorphic prodigy, he-rock-like solid master of multiple syncretism and cross-breeding.
LOGOS' performers took this attitude seriously: in a scene made of theatrical gags, rock concert-like lights, and alien, floating sounds, they reset for their exciting ensemble a collection of Zappa's songs, and cut and glued them with Stravinskij, Mingus, De Rossi Re, and some original creations of their own. Maestro Zappa would have been sincerely grateful.
Guido Barbieri, "Il Messaggero"

A Perspective About Frank Zappa.

Dedicated to Frank Zappa: this is the mark of the soirée conceived by Cristiano Becherucci and Cristina Rinaldi, which took place at the Acquario Romano in the Nuova Consonanza 34th Festival frame.
The really original performing group was the LOGOS ensemble.
It wasn't a predictable perspective about a boundary artist, like Zappa is nowadays considered to be, but it happened to be a naked facing of a set of musical languages, none of which delimited and fenced in, but actually introduced and defined by a certain sense of shadow, of chiaroscuro. We heard Zappa's works, like Uncle Meat, Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue, The Black Page, Run Home Slow Theme, G Spot Tornado, all performed according to a cross-over band criteria, to be put amongst the rock-jazz contemporary literature classics.
As for the sound, we must admit that the LOGOS ensemble performance happens to be convincing, not only for the musicians' ability to present Zappa's music, but for their ironic interpretation, which both characterised it and avoided an easy and useless normalisation of this author, who's been miscast by educated critics for too long.
Zappa's renaissance recalls us how late are sometimes critics compared to the musical realities growing alongside.
This line of interpretation affected the way they proposed some stuff from Stravinskij repertoire, actually Circus Polka, Tango and Rag-Time, which better let focus on his ability to mix popular musical experiences with classical music. It was also interesting their performing of Charlie Mingus' Fables of Fabous: the legendary double-bass player is universally considered a great composer.
Leonardo V. Distaso, "Il Tempo"

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