Even though he never shied away from stating his clear musical affinity and his own significance, he was no longer a part of “the action”. Living among free-ranging animals and 40 years of accumulated debris, including clapped-out computers, voice coils, cones and Tesla wheels, Roşca remained acutely aware of the physical distance between himself and Kraftwerk’s Kling Klang Studio in Düsseldorf and Moroder’s Musicland in Munich.
I built the biggest wall with metal insertions” – Rodion Roşca
I built a wall two metres tall, 40 metres width, 25 metres long. I was a man who was working all the time. “I had a lot of expensive tools, jig saws and drill machines. Holed up in Aşchileu Mare, a village 30 kilometres from Cluj, he had built an anti-Gracelands wall around his house as a bulwark against grief and public intrusion, trading in auto parts, repairing motorbikes and advertising himself as a guitar tuner for hire while melding funky and cerebral rhythms on his kitchen table at 3am. Picturesque allusions to his innate genius couldn’t hide the fact that his diagnosis of inoperable cancer sharply accentuated his sense of squandered time, having given up music when his beloved mother Rozalia died in 1989. In 2017, carrying an added weight of 1.5kg of abdominal fluid, suffering chronic fatigue and spells of vertigo due to cancer, Roşca adopted the gait of a down-at-toga legislator from the outskirts of the Roman Empire. It was illegal to contact or talk to foreigners, but I did” – Rodion Roşca “I contacted unknown tourist groups paying them 20–30 Deutsch Marks to buy albums, then send them to me. After Ceauşescu’s execution, the unravelling of his personality cult had less to do with samizdat copies of James Joyce’s Ulysses, more to do with pirated VHS copies of Pretty Woman and amped-up Motörhead. Others, like Roşca, failed to recant under instruction or go weak at the knees as a supplicant to Ceauşescu’s nightmare vision of socialist ‘engineered soul’. Following the Romania 1989 revolution/coup that culminated in the overthrow and execution of both Ceaușescu and his wife Elena, satirical pamphlets circulating through the re-emerging counterculture speculated that dossiers stolen from Ceauşescu’s architectural folly the Primaverii Palace revealed that he’d had Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” on his mind when he was drafting his infamous July Theses, a 1971 speech announcing new measures and new offensives against non-compliant intellectuals, artists and dissenting others. As others sought out forbidden esoterica like T he Yoga Journal (yoga was then classified as forbidden science) or lurked in car parks on the outskirts of Bucharest swapping Western action films smuggled from Budapest, Rosca bought discs from Norway, assembling what was to become a renowned collection of Italo disco, psychedelic and metal by groups such as Dik-Dik, MC5, ELP and Kraftwerk. While working at a power plant in 1975, he met Gicu Fărcaş and Adrian Căpraru (the G and A of the group) and formed Rodion GA. Like many longhairs of the 1970s throughout the former Soviet zones, Roşca received his alt musical schooling in Western pop during the 1960s via Radio Luxembourg, whose signals carried musical forms – subversive R&B, rock ’n’ roll and transgressive fuzz feedback – deemed anathema to the political order of the Soviet Union. After his return, there followed a total ideological reversal and establishment of brutal Stalinist totalitarianism. The crash, bang, wallop of loop, flange and Doctor Q effects steered Rodion GA’s drum machine and Soviet-made Faemi organ driven sound to a further musical abroad, far from the frilly shirted mainstream dominating the brief period of Romania’s more Western orientated, more ‘liberalised’ domestic policies, which ended after President Nicolae Ceauşescu’s visit to China in 1971. Roşca was a revered precursor of avant pop, the Giorgio Moroder of Romania, king of records. 50 years later, he continued to flirt with the camera while flipping the switches of his splintered Tesla Sonnet reel-to-reel tape machine at London’s Horse Hospital. Early photographs and rare footage of the Romanian group Rodion GA during the 1970s show their founder Rodion Ladislau Roşca to be a handsome, Brando-esque figure in flares eyeing up the lens while shifting amplifiers off a lorry.
0 kommentar(er)
