Fabrizio Rat

The idea is simple. Take a piano, the classical and romantic instrument par excellence, and throw it into the hypnotic and powerful soundscape of techno music. Pianist of Cabaret Contemporain and Magnetic, Fabrizio toured through the festivals of France and Europe in the past years. His solo project started in January 2016 with an EP on Optimo Trax and a live show few months afterwards. A video of the live has buzzed on the net and the ‘technopiano’ has become a real phenomenon in underground techno. The force of human repetition, the imperfection of analog machines transports the public into an hypnotic state. A performance of this kind has rarely been seen in clubs. The right hand is the sequencer of the ‘technopiano’, the left hand is the Dj who handles drum machine and bass and mix everything. Who really is the machine it is hard to say. The piano become a giant synthesizer played by hand and is ‘prepared’ (modified) with objects and techniques DIY (e.g. scotch tape and patafix on strings). The sound is then transformed to go beyond the romantic cliches often associated to the instrument. Fabrizio Rat - La Machina sign with Involve his new Technopiano EP produced exclusively with piano, TR909 and TB303. The result is an hypnotic trip mixing addictive prepared piano riffs with sounds of acid techno. His new album will be released in May on the label Blackstrobe by Arnaud Rebotini. ‘’La Machina is my love story with the machines which created the sound of techno music. These machines are far from being ‘perfect’, they almost have feelings I believe, and they behave unexpectedly and unpredictably sometimes. This aspect makes them unique and impossible to imitate with computers. I realized that I had lots of things to learn from these machines, drum machines in particular (the 909 above all). I thought that by studying and trying to discover their secrets I might have been able to push to new boundaries my ‘machine’ from the very beginning, the piano. A piano made of strings to scrape, damp, hit, to escape the romantic clichés often associated to it. I want to play like machine, but with my human energy which adds something different to the repetition process.’’