Franco Battiato (1945 to 2021) was a Sicilian musician who moved through more worlds than most artists visit in several lifetimes. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen's ideas, he began in the early 1970s as a minimalist and experimental composer, whose albums Fetus, Pollution and the abstract Clic combine avant-garde minimalism, experimental rock and popular forms into a strange hybrid, with Kraut-like passages and concept-album themes of birth and rebirth. At the end of the 1970s he reinvented himself as a philosophical pop songwriter, and La voce del padrone (1981) became one of the best-selling Italian records ever.