Thursday, February 15, 2018

Luca Lo Bianco - Ear Catcher (FITZCARRALDO RECORDS 2018)


The focus that animates the music of the band is the continuous expressive exploration in a creative synthesis with no aesthetic limitations, the result of a natural superposition of musical languages. The repertoire is mainly based on original compositions written by the leader, but there is also space for the music of Suzanne Vega (Language) or Massive Attack (Tear Drop), in a daring alchemy of sound enlivened by contrasts of timbre and articulated arrangements focused on choral execution.

Migrants abandon a place which has become inhospitable, nomads invent the lands in which they move and learn new languages, superimposing them with memories of a land that they have never had. The nomad, for what he has seen or heard, could go back home with red eyes or perforated ear drums. He could forget. He could even escape. Or else, he could look at all the spaces and extensions and transform them into intentions. Nomad music is like this: it transforms landscapes into escape routes, into new tangled streets, into a weapon. Great geographical adventures are escape routes, from which new forms of music are born. With long trips, Luca Lo Bianco travelled unpredictable paths, he transformed the intensity of the world into his own way of speaking.

Far from definitions, this music has spoken thousands of languages, it has been contaminated, it has lain traps for the open spaces of the city it portrays, in which deserts and urban steppe grow, in which the sound takes on the colour of the streets. He invented nomadism as an answer. Like the necessity to lose control of your own language to put something with an unpredictable life into the world, but in order to follow this route we need to know how to listen and capture the vibrations of the air with our ears.

1. Girl with a red bike 03:31
2. Tear drop 06:35
3. Overnight 04:46
4. They are still watching us 04:05
5. Oop 07:13
6. Language 04:00
7. Zulu dream 05:29
8. Bar code 07:38
9. Afternoon...a kind of 04:08

Francesco Guaiana - electric guitar
Gaspare Palazzolo - soprano, tenor sax, clarinet
Marco Di Fonte - cello
Fabrizio Giambanco - drums

guest: 
Fabio Rizzo - lapsteel guitar

All compositions by Luca Lo Bianco except:
N.2 by Del Naja, Marshall, Volles, Fraser
N.6 by Susanne Vega
N.8 by F. Guaiana
N.9 by J. Giuffre/L. Lo Bianco

Recorded at Music Box Studio in Palermo, April 2008
Sound engineer Enzo Puccio
Mixed at Lab Music Recording Studio by Antonio Zarcone and Luca Lo Bianco
Published by Fitzcarraldo Records