Belfi/Grubbs/Pilia “Onrushing Cloud” LP (and Download) will be released on October 19th 2010, on Blue Chopsticks
It will be available soon on Drag City website

Here you can listen an excerpt from the title track Onrushing Cloud - excerpt

And here below you can read to some brand new reviews from Frans De Waard/Vital Weekly and Rick Moody (the well known novelist)

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Vital Weekly 743

All three musicians on this record have had releases on Hapna, so they were all aware of each other’s work. Two guitarists (David Grubbs and Stefano Pilia) and one drummer (Andrea Belfi). They met up in New York when the Italians were involved in a fellowship project and recorded this album. Its not a work of just two guitars and drums, as there is also electronics, piano and ultimately, in the title piece, Grubbs voice. Three likeminded spirits at work here. Masters, each own in his own right, of contemplative music with a rock background. The title piece, perhaps, is the one that comes closest to that rock background. In the other, instrumental, pieces, they are in more general flow of sound, with vast open spaces, strumming gently, spacious, free percussive sounds but underneath that tension of Belfi’s electronics, mild to heavy distortion (in ‘Lightning Vault’, which is the logical heavy weight conclusion of the album). Although divided into five pieces, the built up is excellent.

From the sparse opening song, the noisy interlude ‘Nitrated Out’, the more complex ‘City Rats On Mountain Pass’ to the two already mentioned pieces: a fine, dramatic, theatrical build up. Great collaboration. (FdW)

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The Rumpus
by Rick Moody
I was therefore very excited to hear of a Grubb’s new collaborative album coming out in vinyl, this time with Andrea Belfi and Stefano Pilia, both Italians with experimental and avant-garde rockist tendencies, the whole being entitled, as shown above, Onrushing Cloud. This is a great title, and it suggests the sound of the whole, which is made from electric guitars (Grubbs and Pilia) and percussion/electronics (Belfi), excepting a tiny bit of piano and singing by Grubbs on the title track. The whole starts slow, and builds toward some agreeable wall of interdependent syncopations, in which the lead instrument is more often Belfi’s electronics than it is the guitars, and that is consonant with Grubbs’s other efforts along similar lines. The lyric for the one “song”—though this is a misnomer in that the album proceeds through its five cuts without interruption and is therefore continuous—is great too. It has a Bashoesque allusiveness, including the presence of rats, where rats ought not to be. Most often, these days, David Grubbs is somewhat overworked by his job at Brooklyn College where he teaches electronic music and composition and other things, and it might be to the detriment of those who love his songs, but still, despite his heavy schedule, he manages to fit in these beautiful semi-improvised collaborative albums, likewise his pieces for art installation and film, and the fact is that that these pieces teach as well, as Grubbs often does generally; he is nothing if not a thinker, an intellectual, and a person of subtle but enthusiastic passions, and even the most recondite and obscure of his passions always includes lessons (easy pieces, to speak in the Feynman mode) on how to listen and to appreciate, and Onrushing Cloud is a perfect example.

The 10 CD box set “Musica Imrpovvisa”, which contains also Tumble’s “for tumbling” CD, it has been reviewed by Julian Cowley on September’s issue of The Wire Magazine.

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Musica Improvvisa Various Die Schachtel 10×CD + DVD Musica Improvvisa

A ten CD box set of material recorded by Italian players between 2006 and 2010, is billed as a project about electronic improvisation and new sonic landscapes. It’s beautifully produced, with sound quality as crisp as the packaging’s bold black-and-white graphic design. Each CD is allocated to a particular group, and in effect, this hefty box houses ten separate releases. Listening to the cello and electric guitar duo Amuleto, you hear texturally oriented pieces, flavoured with field recordings that open up like memory spaces within the duo’s droning atmospheres.

With the duo Tumble you hear various waves of minimalism – Terry Riley, Rhys Chatham, dub – reverberating through a series of engaging improvisations, as drummer Andrea Belfi weaves with agility through the looping, undulating patterns that emanate from Atilla Faravelli’s computer and turntable.

The absence of a prevailing stylistic orthodoxy is striking. Electronics are by no means always dominant, and echoes of other musics compromise the newness of these sonic landscapes, but there’s certainly a healthy diversity of approaches in evidence. It’s a very different release from the retrospective 12 CD box issued by Italian percussionist Andrea Centazzo’s Ictus Records in 2006. That set retrieved recordings of improvised music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Centazzo was playing with the likes of Derek Bailey, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker and Lol Coxhill, as well as then unfamiliar figures from the emerging American scene, including John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne. A lot of that music remains stimulating, but it’s delimited by conversational structuring and a language of free improvisation that largely defines itself against the expressive conventions of jazz.

The musical idiom used by drummer Marco Ariano and bassist Gianfranco Tedeschi on the trio Xubuxue’s contribution has some affinity with Centazzo’s dialogues with bassist Kent Carter, but Elio Martusciello’s presence on laptop makes a significant difference. One of the founders of Bowindo, a label hosting electroacoustic work that has been an important galvinising presence in Italian improvised music in recent times, his role in Xubuxue is to enlarge the soundfield. He creates a projective situation, locating the instrumental utterances within an expanded field, opening out theconversational structure into a less focused, more pervasive transference of energy.

In another trio, Ossatura, Martusciello performs with percussionist Fabrizio Spera and Luca Venitucci on accordion and piano. In 1998 they released the memorable Dentro, with guest Tim Hodgkinson. Here they are joined by Gene Coleman on bass clarinet and cellist Marina Peterson to make music that is challengingly abstract yet has real physical impact, sounds that stretch the imagination while making your calves tighten and jaw clench. It has a current feel, a digital signature, yet in a sense, Ossatura are consolidating practices established during the mid-1960s by Italian improvisation group Nuova Consonanza and the Rome based American electroacoustic ensemble Musica Elettronica Viva. Like them, Ossatura engage with sound as malleable material, exploring texture, timbre and coloration while still sounding muscular and purposeful.

Ossatura’s Fabrizio Spera is heard in an altogether different context as a member of Thau, a predominantly Swiss quartet, with Hans Koch blowing reeds and making sparing use of electronics, singer Sabine Meyer and electric bassist Paed Conca. The character of Meyer’s voice suggests that she could be at home singing standards but here she extends outward, into fragmented utterance and atomized expression. Thau sound like a deconstructed jazz group, a well-balanced format dissolving into something unrecognisable. Well worth hearing, but ‘electronic improvisation’ only in a limited sense. AMP 2 – a contraction of Advanced Music & Media Pool Palermo – is, on the other hand, just the kind of triple-laptop, percussion and prepared guitar quintet that the project would seem to promise. They too have recorded with Tim Hodgkinson – Hums, issued last year on Bowindo – and while the fizzing, flaring dynamics suggest analogies from chemistry or particle physics they manage to convey an almost tactile presence through sonic abstraction.

There’s an unevenness to the quality of the individual discs, perhaps inevitable given the stylistic diversity. Those mentioned so far are firmly on the plus side. So are the duo An Experiment In Navigation. Robert Sassi plays electric guitars and Xabier Iriondo wields a custom-built multi-string tabletop instrument. Residue from Prog rock and Metal is recombined into dramatic atmospheres and craggy sculpted forms. Sassi retains elements of melody and pulse; Iriondo supplies an Industrial dimension and an air of menace. Ambient rock Improv, essentially, but more involving than that label might suggest.

Less satisfying are Wintermute, a trio also featuring Iriondo, who have drawn inspiration from William Gibson’s Neuromancer in creating a hybrid of radiophonic psychodrama and avant rock soundscapes that seems destined to have a short shelf-life. The fractured scurrying phrases and scattered rhythms of electric guitar, saxophone and drums trio A Spirale hark back squarely to the free jazz end of the European Improv spectrum. Ultimately it sounds all too familiar. Ligatura are an extemporised chamber music outfit, using prepared piano, electric guitar, double bass and percussion, who sound ponderously self-aware.

As a weighty signpost plonked onto the shifting sands of the recent Italian improvising scene, Musica Improvvisa indicates a choice of available routes forward. Some are clearly more viable than others, and I’d suggest that Elio Martusciello is an unusually reliable guide. 

An extensive overview of new Italian improvisation provides an uneven guide to constantly shifting terrain. By Julian Cowley

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2010/08/mark-templeton-exclusive/

Mark Templeton made a mix for Fluid radio, which includes songs from italian musicians like Andrea Belfi, Giuseppe Ielasi, Nicola Ratti, Attila Faravelli, Claudio Rocchetti, Stefano Pilia.

listen Tumble - Gymnastic Apparatus

“for tumbling” is part of a 10 CD Box set called “Musica Improvvisa” which contains many different italian ensambles and groups  who works with improvisation and instant composition, like Ossatura, Apsirale, Amp3, Ligatura. more info @ http://www.dieschachtel.com/editions/DSIMP1.html

track list:
1-trampoline
2-gymnastic apparatus
3-consisting of a strong canvas sheet
4-attached with springs
5-to a metal frame
6-used
7-for tumbling

Tumble is an electroacoustic duo featuring Andrea Belfi and Attila Faravelli.
They create their own sound world throught instant composition/improvisation.
The results of their compositional  process is a chaotic as weel  as rational music where rhythms created by drums and  electroacoustic devices melts together with magmatic movement of sounds diffused by broken and modified speakers.