Andrea Belfi announces new album Natura Morta, streams track “Roteano”

Andrea Belfi announces new album Natura Morta, streams track "Roteano"

The Italian electroacoustic composer Andrea Belfi has announced a new album, Natura Morta. This LP is his first solo work since 2012’s Wege, though earlier this year he released Dust & Mirrors as a member of the Andrea Belfi/David Grubbs/Stefano Pilia trio. Unlike Wege’s grainy explorations of electroacoustic systems, or Dust & Mirror’s quasi post-rock dynamics, Natura Morta marks a full-on immersion in experimental composition for the Veneto-born musician.

With a clear pictorial inspiration, the album’s title references Renaissance ‘still lifes’ while describing Belfi’s working method: an intense focus on detail that progressively erupts into a complex figure. Indeed, Caravaggio may have spent a few days on a single fig leaf, but one cannot consider his Canestra di frutta anything but a masterful study of light and its representation (with a neat trompe l’oeil to boot). In Natura Morta Belfi pursues a similar approach, adopting sustain and repetition as primary tools to work on an aural canvas, which, after a slow and careful development, results in pieces of opulent tension and truly tactile beauty. Moreover, Natura Morta qualifies as an accomplished synthesis of Belfi’s work up to date, fusing the structurally ambitious ambient pieces of 2006’s Between Neck & Stomach, the comparatively more chill synth waves of 2008’s Knots and Merge’s minimalist leanings.

Andrea Belfi started as a punk rock drummer in his teens and through most of the past decade served as instrumental-rock combo Rosolina Mar’s percussionist, and has kept rhythmic exploration at the forefront of his work ever since. A compulsive collaborator, Belfi is currently playing drums with Mike Watt’s Il sogno del Marinaio (with Stefano Pilia in tow too), but has worked with a plethora of artists in the past, including: Aidan Baker, Carla Bozulich (most recently on her album Boy), BJ Nilsen, and Renato Rinaldi, among many others.

Partially recorded at Berlin’s Funkhouse and mastered by Nils Frahm, Natura Morta will be out on November 11 via Miasmah.

Natura Morta tracklisting:

01. Oggetti creano forme
02. Nel vuoto
03. Roteano
04. Forme creano oggetti
05. Su linee rette
06. Immobili

• Andrea Belfi: http://www.chocolateguns.com
• Miasmah: http://www.miasmah.com

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