La voce Stratos A film byLuciano D'Onofrio, Monica Affatato

From "Pugni chiusi" to Area, through John Cage. The film about Demetrio Stratos, his unique voice and his unparalleled research.

Demetrio Stratos was born in Egypt to Greek parents. He first came to Italy in the 1960s where he becomes the singer of I Ribelli, which had been the band of Adriano Celentano.

In the 1970s he co-founded Area, one of the most provocative and innovative experimental pop groups. Area brought musical exploration directly to the streets and protest gatherings. The band combined rock, jazz, contemporary western music, ethnical themes and electronic sounds.

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 artists such as John Cage, as he was able to express a very wide range of tonality, and was able to emit even three different-pitched sounds simultaneously. He gets studied by phisicians and phoniatrists.

At the age of 34 he dies for a leukemy. A concert to raise funds and pay his cure at the Memorial Hospital of New York had been organized by his friends in Milan. He dies the day before, so the concerts turn into a huge tribute to the man and the artists with more than 60.000 people in the audience and 100 artists on stage.

The paths followed by his voice lead us to discover the creativeness of Italian and European political and artistical movements of the 70s, whose heritage is often at the fundaments of today’s society.

Director’s Note

What is the voice? Where does it come from? Where can it get to? Artists, scientists and anthropologists provide a host of different answers to these questions.

Demetrio Stratos was a unique voice in the world, whose overwhelming abilities cannot be gathered in the usual musical categories.

Our movie aims to re-discover these abilities with the help of nowadays musicians that explore the techniques he surveyed so deeply. At the same time we provided other layers of contents concerning the changes acting into those years’ society, of whose Stratos was a direct protagonist.

His research on the liberation of the voice from pre-arranged canons is a part of an international research, not only based upon the arts – the liberation of the body as a social and political matter, as a piece of the hopes and utopias of the 70s – to be today still actual and fertile.

Reviews

“A documentary that brings us inside Demetrio Stratos, inside what is most difficult to tell: his vocal stunts, his artistical growth, that quiet face and that enormous thorax which kept a relentless and calm creative revolution.

(…)

The Stratos Voice doesn’t look for nostalgia or the easy biopic, but tries to rationalize and explain its greatness in a documentary that unites poetry, emotion and even the science. A jewel, run to see it.”

(Boris Sollazzo, “Liberazione”)