Browse by Artist: BELFI, ANDREA

Artist:	BELFI, ANDREA
Title:	Between Neck & Stomach
Label:	HAPNA (SWEDEN)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	HAPNA 029CD

This is Italy-based Andrea Belfi's second full-length release. Belfi is the drummer of Rosolina Mar and is a member of Medves along with Giuseppe Ielasi, Stefano Pilia, Renato Rinaldi and Riccardo Wanke. In 2002, Belfi embarked on a vast project, which, in time, would become Between Neck & Stomach. The first recordings took place at Valerio Tricoli's (member of 3/4HadBeenEliminated) house in Bologna. Between Neck & Stomach is grounded on two core elements: the first is the material collected during the unique experiment of turning a house into "a living creature with its own voice" (just one example: a synth emitting one continuous note shaking a cupboard filled with pots, pans and plates). The second core element is the choice of just one thematic note per song, around which each track is built and balanced. In this challenging album, the acoustic elements and the electronic ones mingle, intertwine and sometimes switch places: the acoustic sounds are treated as if they were electronic, and the actual electronic sounds are played at the very moment. This album sketches imaginary landscapes where drums, guitars and voices blend into a bunch of eclectic tracks, which, in spite of their radical minimalist roots, are definitively worthy of the name "songs."

Artist:	BELFI, ANDREA
Title:	Wege
Label:	ROOM40 (AUSTRALIA)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.50
Catalog #:	RM 446CD

Wege translates as "path" and it's a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The album's four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape. Wege is Belfi's fourth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Belfi has developed a complex musical network of possibilities. With this electro-acoustic system, influenced in part by Steve Reich's "Pendulum Music," Wege's four pieces revolve around spiraling interconnections of synthesizer, feedback and drums. Belfi explains further: "This device creates feedbacks on two drums on my drum kit, and I can modify it by stopping and stretching the drum skins with hands and various kinds of sticks, mallets and brushes, and/or by filtering the feedback with a modular synthesizer." Edited in a quiet apartment in Greifswald (Germany) a small town on the Baltic Sea, the record bears marks of the stillness of the surroundings in which it was finalized. There is a sense of hushed awe and a subtle reference to the wind-swept coldness of the landscape in these pieces. Wege was mastered and mixed by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page