UK orders over £50 ship free!
Recommended by us on 3rd February 2012
...according to our Phil on Thu 02 Feb, 2012.
Andrea Belfi has been knocking about for a bit now. This is his fourth album and he creates experimental soundscapes whilst being the king of all things percussion. The music has been created using a new device created by Belfi and in his own words... “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 an a modular synthesizer.” So that's all cleared up now. It's a lovely listen actually and only 4 minutes into the 1st track I'm in some percussive trance with a shuffly beat being smothered in electronic bleeps and swirls. It's strangely hypnotic as is the whole album in fact. There's a gorgeous electro acoustic vibe running though the album with some beautiful strings (guitar, violin, cello). A lot of the strings are quite dour sounding but then coupled with the intense percussion and electronics everything works together really well to make some unique swampy sounding tracks. Anyhoo if you're into percussion then you should definitely try and listen to this as there's some really interesting rhythms on there. It also features Greg Haines & Rutger Zuydervelt and it's mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi which is nice.
Wege translates as ‘path’ and it’s a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums’ four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape.
Wege is Belfi’s forth 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 an 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 finalised. There is a sense of hushed awe and a subtle reference to the wind swept coldness of the landscape in these pieces.
Wege is mastered and mixed by Giuseppe Ielasi.
With this electro-acoustic system, influenced in part by Steve Reich
Be the first to review this record. Best reviewer each month gets £10 off their next order!
Norman Records,
Unit 20, Croydon House,
Croydon Street,
Leeds,
LS11 9RT, UK.
Tel/fax: (+44) 0113 245 4399
Email: phil@normanrecords.com
Follow us on Facebook
We want to be the best online record store in the UK, so please send us your ideas and feedback.
(We don't spam and we won't give your email address to anyone else. One email a week is all you'll ever get. Read our privacy policy.)
For payment and account functions on this site, all traffic is encrypted with SSL. Our SSL certificate is provided by Thawte: view our certificate.
This site is regularly audited for security problems by Netcraft. For more information please take a look at our Netcraft Security Seal.
We don't handle credit card details on this site. When it comes to taking your card payment we hand you straight over to eWAY - a secure, PCI DSS compliant payment gateway.
