Premiere: Fabrizio Rat Launches “La Machina” Imprint with “Double Bind” EP

Fabrizio Rat starts his own techno label La Machina, a platform for music-oriented to the dancefloor as well as to the mind.

The first release, the Double Bind EP, includes 4 tracks of uncompromising analog techno, labyrinthine sequences, hypnotic textures and banging beats mixing modular synths melodies, drum machines and acoustic piano sounds.

On the B side, a Phenakistoscope completes the experience, as the artwork animates when the record turns. Hand and mechanism, oscillator and string, man and machine have rarely been so close.

Fabrizio Rat has clear ideas about the imprint:

“My project is simple. Take a piano, the classic and romantic instrument par excellence, and project it into the hypnotic and powerful soundscape of techno music.”

As a matter of fact, he comes from a double background. He’s a classically trained pianist who practised improvisation and composed contemporary music, but since his teenage years he has produced electronic music, and spent hours and days with computer, synthesisers and drum machines.

“After many years of practice my musical path seemed to be planned. The ‘traditional’ way of playing the piano had bored me. I knew too well the instrument, I couldn’t be creative any more with the codes and rules I had learnt. I was looking for a new way to approach the instrument, a balance between chance and control, similar to the feeling you get by working instinctively on synthesizers. I realized I had many things to learn from analogue electronic instruments, which represent more than just strictness and precision. These machines, far from being ‘perfect’, almost have feelings I believe, and they behave unexpectedly and unpredictably at times. I thought that by studying and trying to discover their secrets I might be able to push to new boundaries my ‘machine’ from the very beginning, the piano.”

Since his teenage years, Fabrizio has worked simultaneously on both classical and electronic music productions. He’s definitely not the classical music guy who has just discovered techno. Throughout his apprentice years at the musical academy in Turin he was working as a producer in dance music studios at the same time (“commercial stuff” he admits ), hiding his ‘double life’ to both the professors, and the DJs. Arriving in Paris in 2007 his objective starts to take shape.

“I always had this idea to do electronic music you can dance to, techno, with acoustic instruments, and especially with the piano.”

In 2010 he starts a first band called Jukebox, then Cabaret Contemporain, an ensemble of technoid music with 2 double basses, guitar, drum and piano. One of the main keys to understanding Fabrizio’s work is the preparation of his piano, inspired by the great Italian double bass player Stefano Scodanibbio. Avant-garde composer John Cage had initiated the “prepared piano” practice in the 40s by placing different types of objects (metal, wood, paper, wood…) on or between strings. The piano’s timbre is then altered into a more percussive direction, transforming pitch, intensity and resonance of each note.

“I use for example packaging tape, which generates a sort of natural saturation while vibrating. I also use plastic rulers on the low strings, to generate a sort of white noise, and I struck small sticks on strings and tuning pins to create percussive sounds. I also use a lot blu-tac (Patafix), which I put on specific points of the string to obtain harmonics. I also use it to damp the lowest string of piano to produce a sort of kick- drum sound.”

Fabrizio Rat is not the only pianist who tries to renew the approach towards the instrument. Over the last 10 years, interpreters and composers like Francesco Tristano, Nils Frahm, Hauschka, Guillaume Flamen, Grandbrothers and the Vanessa Wagner-Murcof duo have crossed the path of classical and electronic music. Even if he appreciates some of them, Fabrizio moves away from that trend, to approach a much more radical techno.

“I want to be in the loop, into the hypnotic process, and that’s it. I don’t want the instrument to be recognizable, people to say, ‘It’s a cover of that techno track on the piano.’ Eventually, I feel much more connected with artists of the techno scene like Ø Phase or Donato Dozzy.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s in front of the dancefloor, in clubs or festivals, that Fabrizio plays his live sets. With the right hand he plays repetitive rhythmical patterns while the left one handles the machines and manipulates the piano strings. His goal is to reach  “the trance, to project on the dancers the hypnotic state of my right hand moving on the piano.”

Fabrizio Rat’s Double Bind EP is out July 15th and available here

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