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La voce del padrone 1981
Album · by Franco Battiato ↗ View artist

La voce del padrone

The Voice of the Master is the album that took Franco Battiato from local fame to mass appeal in Italy. Recorded in 1981, it sounds like a synthesis of electronic music, new wave, and Italian melodies with a mysterious air, as if each song held a secret revealed only after multiple listens. The title plays on the name of the record label His Master’s Voice, but in Italian it sounds like a warning: "the voice of the master." It’s not an album of easy anthems, but of atmospheres built with layers of synthesizers and lyrics that seem to come from another place.The track that changed everything was Centro di gravità permanente, a hit that sold sixty thousand copies in France and stayed stuck in radios for months.

Year
1981
Songs
7
Duration
31 min 22 seg
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About the album

La voce del padrone, according to DoReSol

Battiato recorded it with a structure that repeats an obsessive pattern, as if the balance of the world depended on that rhythm. The Spanish and German versions of the album prove it wasn’t just for Italy: they wanted the sound to cross borders. And they succeeded: in 1982, the album spent eighteen weeks at number one on the charts, rare for an artist who until then was known only in smaller circles.Behind that success lies a curious technical detail: EMI Italia released it without waiting, trusting the material had something special. Sales exceeded one million copies, a record that made it the first Italian album to achieve this. They weren’t aiming for a commercial record, but something that sounded like the future—and in the process, they created a bridge between Italian music and the European electronic scene of the era.