L'arca di Noè - Noah's Ark

The incredible success of La voce del padrone included sold-out concerts in stadiums filled with audience members singing along from memory with even the most abstruse of Battiato’s songs. At first he was touched by such mass public acceptance, but in the end it left him rather unsettled. Aside from the pressure from his record label to come up with something that would replicate the success of that album, the demonstrations of affection from his public seemed excessive to Battiato. Released in December of 1982, L’arca di Noè was ready to go months sooner, but its release was postponed until La voce del padrone fell off the charts. Not surprisingly, Battiato goes in a new direction. The lyrics are more narrative and less fragmented than before, and the music is colored by the use of a sequencer (the Roland Microcomposer) and the Fairlight (a very high-end synthesizer and sampler), along with the increased use of the Madrigal Singers of Milan for choral effects. Think for a moment of the arc of Battiato’s “pop” albums. In L’era del cinghiale bianco we see the yearning for a return to an age where spirituality reigns supreme. In Patriots, there’s the rallying cry of “Up Patriots to Arms” and the sense of giving change a good effort. In La voce del padrone, however, we see the white flags of surrender. L’arca di Noè brings us to the apocalypse, which only a few will survive. Battiato considered his Ark to be a symbolic one, in the same way that P.D. Ouspensky talked about the teachings of Gurdjieff in his book In Search of the Miraculous: “The teachings themselves were an ark, thanks to which we could hope to save ourselves at the moment of the diluvium.” Needless to say, when Battiato looked around at the world in 1982, there was much that he didn’t like about the state of humanity and the directions things were going.