Andrea Belfi
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DISCOGRAPHY
Andrea Belfi "Between Neck & Stomach" CD (Hapna records 2006)

1-Sandlglass
2-ExtraEvil listen
3-Broken Shoes
4-Sleeping With ExtraEvil listen
5-Her Own Desert
6-Footprints

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 they were electronic, and the actual electronic ones are played at the very moment. Rhythmic patterns go beyond the mere beat as AB shapes them in cycles, ever-circling but ever-changing, both reassuring and surprising. 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'.

Andrea Belfi's skills in composing and editing is electro acoustic works were clearly perceivable in his 2002 debut album, Ned n°2, warmly welcomed and well reviewed by magazines such as The Wire, Bananafish, Sound Projector

REVIEWS

  • The Wire (December 2006)
  • Vital Weekly (December 2006)
  • Boomkat (December 2006)
  • Blowupmagazine (October 2006)
  • Sodapop (October 2006)
  • SandsZine (November 2006)
  • Undomondo (November 2006)
  • Cracked (November 2006)
  • Subjectivisten (November 2006)
  • Alternative Nation (November 2006)
  • Bad Alchemy (November 2006)
  • RockLab (Ottobre 2006)
  • Tiny Mix Tapes (November 2006)
  • Digital Industries (December 2006)
  • Sonhors (December 2006)
  • Debug (December 2006)
  • Kinda Muzik (December 2006)
  • All Music Guide (December 2006)
  • Sentireascoltare (Marzo 2007)
  • Monochrome magazine(October 2006)
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    REVIEWS
    Boomkat (Dicembre 2006)
    22-12-2006

    Italian musician Andrea Belfi has come up with something truly wonderful on his second album ‘Between Neck & Stomach’. Originally trained as a drummer, Belfi created this album over the last four years using two key ideas; the first was that he felt the house he was recording in should be a “living creature with its own voice”. By that he meant that if he was playing something in a room which would cause vibrations or a specific sound, all that should be recorded and emphasized – so you might hear pots and pans rattling as a synthesizer note resonates, or the specific reverb from a bathroom used as the primary part of a track. The other idea was that each piece should be based around one thematic note around which the rest of the track is built. This might sound limiting but over the course of six tracks Belfi shows just how far he can take these themes and how he can mould them to fit his needs. On ‘Extraevil’ what begins as a raucous and frenetic percussion and melodica track halfway through strips down to almost nothing, just a rumble of toms, the melodica drone and the tremble of guitar strings, elsewhere ‘Her Own Desert’ takes a Thomas Koner-style cavernous drone and punctuates it with metallic sounds and bizarre field recordings. The album comes to a close with ‘Footprints’, probably the most traditional sounding track of the six, but it is no less expressive or indeed impressive than the rest. Building melancholy melodies around a glassy hit note and gorgeous percussion this could be the soundtrack to countless European films - in itself an apt summation of all the themes Belfi has approached and mastered over the course of this intriguing album. An engrossing and striking record and one which will lodge itself in your memories for a long time to come.
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