Barrock are one of the genuinely obscure entries in this section, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Three albums across nine years, on three labels in three countries, by a group whose hometown none of the public sources names — though their first cassette came out on a label named for Pordenone, and their first album was recorded in Udine.

The short version

Barrock formed in Italy in 1982 around Valter Poles and Giuseppe Vendramin, with three singers who had come from classical study and a rhythm section drawn from other local bands. They released a cassette in 1985 and three albums between the start of the 1990s and 1999: L’Alchimista on a Japanese label, Oxian on a Dutch one, and La strega on Mellow Records in Italy, which the band describe as their last work. Their music combines early-music keyboard writing with a rock rhythm section, and for two of the three albums, two female voices.

Formed in 1982, first album nine years later

The band’s own written history is the only continuous account that exists. It says the group came together in 1982 out of earlier classical work by Paola Polese, Graziella Vendramin and Laura Ivan, joined by Valter Poles and Giuseppe Vendramin; that the move toward rock brought in Maurizio Poles and Giampaolo Poles, already an established rhythm pair locally; and that a cassette of early material reached the owner of a nearby studio, who offered them the full use of it for a professional recording; and that they were soon being set alongside the leading names of the new Italian progressive rock. Nine years passed between the group forming and their first album appearing.

The name is the description

The name tells you what the music is. Keyboards written and voiced as early-music instruments — harpsichord and spinet figures, fugal writing, recorder and flute where a rock band would put a saxophone — over a conventional rock rhythm section, with two operatic female voices on the first two records. Writing in Exposé, Peter Thelen put it plainly: the music combines elements of baroque and rock, much as the name implies. Rob Walker, in the same issue, heard a strong resemblance to the early records of Banco. That is the clearest description anybody has published of them, and it holds.

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A Dutch compilation, and a Japanese phone call

The break came from outside Italy. A Dutch compilation called Exposure, distributed worldwide from Rotterdam, carried a Barrock track; the band describe it as an instrumental, visionary and very experimental piece. On the strength of it the Japanese label Spring Song Corporation approached them about a first CD, and L’Alchimista appeared on Moon Witch Records with a Japanese obi strip and sleeve notes by Katsuhiko Luna Hayashi. The band report that it did particularly well in Korea. It is an unusual route for an Italian group of this period, and it explains why their debut is a Japanese pressing rather than an Italian one.

Three labels, three countries, three records

The second album went to SI Music in the Netherlands in 1994, and it is the record that got them their widest coverage — two reviews in a single issue of Exposé, a detailed Dutch write-up, and the ratings that still sit on ProgArchives. Then SI Music collapsed, and the search for a new home took them to Mellow Records, the Italian label that has released a long list of the country’s smaller progressive acts. La strega came out there in 1999 with a contracted line-up: the three Poles as a core trio, five guests, and one of the two singers reduced to two wordless appearances. The band call it their last work.

Album by album

Three albums between the start of the 1990s and 1999, on three labels in three countries. Tap any title for its guide.

What is documented, and what is not

The credited musicians across the three records are Valter Poles on guitar and keyboards, Giampaolo Poles on bass, Maurizio Poles on drums, Giuseppe Vendramin on keyboards and acoustic guitar, Paola Polese and Graziella Vendramin on vocals, Ermanno Giacomel on recorder and flute, and, on the last album only, Mauro Martin on keyboards and Rossano Palù on guitar. One caution about the credits: the first album lists a keyboard player as Pino Vendramin and the other two list Giuseppe Vendramin. Pino is a standard short form of Giuseppe and these are very probably the same person, but no source states it, so the pages here keep the names as they are printed.

Where to start

Start with Oxian (1994). It is the album with the widest instrumentation, the clearest documentation, and the only published critical writing about the band worth arguing with. Then La strega (1999), which is their best-rated record and their most unusual, being almost entirely instrumental. L’Alchimista is the one to come to last: it has the thirteen-minute Arthurian suite, but it is also the record about which least is known.

Why they still matter

Barrock matter less as a landmark than as a reminder of how much of this music exists just below the surface. They sit in the Italian section of this site, and they are Italian, but they belong to the generation that came after the famous one: their own history places them among what it calls the new Italian progressive rock, a generation after the wave that produced PFM and Banco. What they built instead was a small, coherent body of work with a genuine identity, funded by three labels in three countries and heard by almost nobody. For anyone who has already worked through the canon, that is exactly the kind of band worth finding.

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