Performing with the Avant Collective

He has completed the following recent works:  Pierre's Eye, Sleepwalkers with Introjects, Chorale Injured Bird, Tears of Eros, Songs from the Impossible and Shaman Without a Tribe I & II. From the book of stories: Musician Without Notes, he has completed the following: My Dinner With Afasia, Ipsiety, Anoxia, and The Glass Case of the Heart's Fragility. He is currently performing with the Avant-Collective a young group of musicians who come out of the optical music of John Zorn. CD's will soon be available by contacting AaronFSmith@hotmail.com . In Europe, CD's will be available through Staalplaat Open Circuit, Amsterdam.

Much of Di Pietro's recent work is involved in forms that blur boundaries. For example in his writings much of the material is in journal form, yet at the same time the writing can be essay like. He is interested in the confessional format which puts him close to the French school of literature, he cites Leiris and Bataille as influences. He merges a knowledge of intuitive improvisational structures such as one might find in Stockhausen, with his own impressionistic and lyrical forms. Recently he juxtaposes earlier works with current writings in what he calls Radio-CD art pieces. 

This 'tap dancing comes' out of the necessity of life as he explained in Musician Without Notes. For example Air Piece written in 1973, is juxtaposed with Anoxia of 1999. The two works (sound and text) are part of a recent transformation in his work. He then adds further dimensions in the realm of performance art and actors and movement. This is what he did with The Glass Case of the Heart's Fragility, (1999) a text work he combined with Clockscape (1973). The whole formed a new work called Onierodrama (Burying the Beloved in Public) a shamanistic waking dream related to Sisyphus.

While many of the previous musical influences cited here were long ago set aside, he still is able to listen to Varese (an early hero) and Messiaen, with fresh ears. As a tight rope walker he balances a dizzing array of information, (Sound and reading) from Foucault to Robert Bly and Arthur Young all tempered with the directness of expression of a Artaud. 'Who cares if you listen' was never a concept he could afford, yet like Francis Bacon and Giacometti he has always created for himself. As he once said quoting Gurdieff "every face in the audience has my own face on it". The 'Gaze' is something he does not address.

Lukas Foss called him "a true original". Yvar Mikhasoff summed up his diversity when he said of him "From Grandma Moses to Feruccio Busoni, world class". This tempering of opposites, is not easy to understand and results in a dialectical tension that Di Pietro strives for; from Krishnamurti to Castenada there is a spiritual aspect in his studies that I have rarely ever heard him discuss.

Like Christian Boltanski there is a quest for the spiritual that often comes out through the poetry he has read and set from Hart Crane, and Charles Olson to Antonio Machado and Pablo Neruda. Rocco Di Pietro epitimizes what the critic W. Janson called "the post-modern condition", from Lacan to Baudrillard.

                                                                                                   Aaron Smith