THE DOCUMENTARY

LA VOCE STRATOS
docufilm

Luciano D'Onofrio – Monica Affatato

Italy, 2009

107'

production: ROUTE1

international distribution: CINEFONIE
http://www.cinefonie.it/

A documentary about the extraordinary career of Demetrio Stratos, 

the voice that became a legend

  What is the voice? Where does it come from? Sound experts, linguists and anthropologists provide a host of different answers to these questions – answers which are often in disagreement with one another.

From a musical point of view, the voice is the only instrument that cannot be put inside a case – indeed, we carry it around within us. The story of each single voice, then, is akin to the story of the person who produces that voice. Is it possible to tell the story of a voice?

    Demetrio Stratos was born in Egypt to Greek parents. He first came to Italy in the 1960s as a university student. He began singing – almost by chance – for the Ribelli, one of the most influential among the beat italiano groups. The amazing thing was: he was Greek!

In the 1970s he co-founded Area, one of Europe’s most provocative and innovative experimental pop groups. Area brought musical exploration directly to the streets and protest gatherings, as well as to the studio and stage. The band combined rock, jazz, contemporary western music, non-western themes and electronic sounds. This was a quantum leap for someone who’d begun his career on a lark, as a soul and R&B singer.

Beginning with Area’s experimental repertoire, and running parallel to this, Stratos engaged in a study of the voice as a pure musical and sound-producing instrument. His discography includes several voice-only records, while he worked with internationally renowned artists such as John Cage.

Recordings and measurements done in phonology research centers went on to show that, besides possessing a very wide range of tonality, Stratos was able to emit two and sometimes three different-pitched sounds simultaneously.

Research conducted by Stratos remains an important reference for those who study the voice as a musical instrument, while his experimentation is to this day unsurpassed. Stratos’s musical exploration marked a new era in the search for possibilities of the human voice, with verbal language being abandoned as the sole or, at any rate, privileged form of vocal musical expression.