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LP
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BS 077LP
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Giovanni Di Domenico has now achieved a personal and unmistakable style within contemporary minimalism. His music always expresses a state of concentration, of recollection and contemplation toward a focal node. Repetition is experienced as alchemical state, as truth contained in the small nuances of change, in a crescendo that never reaches a climax. The atmosphere is intuition and is made up of a few compositional touches. To compose is to make synthesis, to unearth purity, simplicity and exactness. This new work for solo piano is almost an imaginary novel... the notes seem to tell of deserted streets, lonely walks in the night or runs down stairs. In this sense the musician is the writer of silence and the fleeting moment. And so, amid slow chords like Chopin or Satie, moods oscillate between brio and allegro, evoking the lightness of love, greater sadness and melancholy, as well as more restless and agitated ostinatos, the product of a more cathartic worldview.
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LP
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BS 067LP
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If it were possible to relate images with Giovanni Di Domenico's music, the most plausible would be those of forms painted with perfect balance and purity. Absolutely versatile and eclectic, the Italian composer has long accustomed his listeners to sounds full of ecstatic tension, but pervaded with a refined and cyclical harmony of the parts. Musica Per Insiemi is the result of three recordings with three different ensembles, two more varied in terms of orchestral tones, one for organ only and female voices. In their different physiognomy, the tracks retain a common denominator of beauty. Di Domenico has firmly established the frame of reference in his compositions, the spine of ethereal movements of the piano and Fender Rhodes. The mood of the other instruments is attached by subtle stratifications, like a river from which its tributaries wind. In this way, the sound matter advances with the solemn calm and brilliance of the individual fragments. The variety of influences remains in the perennial expectation of minimalist whiteness, of contemporary arias with a Nordic flavor or scents of cosmic drones, but always results in a personal and mysterious overview.
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LP
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DSDM 004LP
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Binding a deep social and political conscious with rigorous musical experimentation, the Brussels based, Italian pianist, performer, composer, Giovanni Di Domenico, delivers Downtown Ethnic Music, the fourth instalment of Die Schachtel's Decay Music series, focused on inspired contemporary experimental efforts in the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract music. Over the last decade or so, Giovanni Di Domenico has carved a deep path through a diverse number of discrete fields within experimental music, working in various ensembles -- Abschattungen, AufHeben, Bonjintan, Cement Shoes, Delivery Health, Going, etc. -- as well as producing a discography of critically heralded solo efforts, and intimate collaborations with Jim O'Rourke, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Akira Sakata, Arve Henriksen, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Alexandra Grimal, Nate Wooley, Chris Corsano, and others. Downtown Ethnic Music encounters Di Domenico reimagining the future of urban music, pluming the mysterious and emotive depths of self, to arrive at vision of sonorous utopia, radically divergent from those of the past. Hybridizing numerous forms of musical practice, while making a conceptual nod to Jon Hassell's notion of the "fourth world", as well as the cross-temporal transnationalism of Roberto Musci, Aktuala, Futuro Antico, and the Third Ear Band, Di Domenico's vision of democracy -- rendered through the creative metaphors of sound -- is a true to life, bristling conflict, as open-ended as it is ordered, and as dramatic and tense as it is beautiful, playful, and refined. A colorful tapestry of ideas, experiences, histories, and reference points, woven from a pallet of electronics, synthesis, and various acoustic sources -- the intervening rhythms of drummer João Lobo, vocals by Pak Yan Lau and Patshiva CIE women choir, the horns of Ananta Roosens and Jordi Grognard etc. -- across the length of Downtown Ethnic Music, the boundaries between idiom, expressive concept, collective, and individual blur, giving way to a visionary, forward-thinking rendering of electroacoustic music, that subtly reminds us of the social and political potential of art. Seamlessly incorporating bubbling electronic abstraction, sprawling ambience and long tones, throbbing kosmische, acoustic free improvisation, and the human voice, Giovanni Di Domenico's Downtown Ethnic Music represents a high-water mark in an already astounding career. 180 gram marble vinyl; one-time edition of 250.
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LP
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SW 001LP
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The new solo LP by Giovanni Di Domenico, Insalata Statica comprises a single album-length composition, initially a suite of six distinct parts that have been weaved together to form a kaleidoscopic whole. Composed and performed almost in its entirety by Di Domenico himself, the music takes listeners from passages of melancholic introspection through to fuzz-laden melodic exuberance. The subtle, shifting harmonies, rhythms and textures are deftly arranged -- often blurring lines between a wide variety of acoustic and electronic instrumentation -- to form a coherent arc from beginning to end. Moving through delicate motifs for horns, woodwinds, percussions, harp, guitar, and electronics into more stately piano-led choruses and even hectic, Hammond-led jazz sections, Insalata Statica will appeal to fans of Jim O'Rourke's The Visitor (2009). The material for the album originated in studio recordings composed for a separate band project five years previously. Through techniques of overdubbing and editing, Di Domenico searched to find a common musical frame in which the different "songs" he had quickly laid down could exist -- and by the same means, to find a way in which to fuse diverse influences. Although the result of meticulous editing, Insalata Statica nevertheless retains a sense of spontaneity and lightness that gives the music an organic quality. Insalata Statica, which translates in English as "static salad" derives from a joke -- a friend's playful description of Di Domenico's music. As the pianist says: "I prepared the salad fairly quickly, then took five years to 'dress' it. I thought it was perfect to have this more static beginning that slowly unfolds into different twists and tricks, to reach a much less static end." While largely recorded in the studio in his current city of residence, Brussels, it seems only fitting that for a peripatetic musician such as Di Domenico the album should suggest the experience of travel throughout its ever shifting movements. Listening to Insalata Statica, one can easily imagine the character of different landscapes -- and their effect on mood and energy. The album's changing moods, colors, and tempos recall the melancholy of Franco Battiato's '70s albums, Brazilian folk flourishes, the spacious, harmonically rich jazz of ECM recordings, and oddball pop. Ushering such influences into a vibrant whole, blending instrumental timbres and melodic lines in surprising ways, Insalata Statica has a compelling, melodic charm all its own.
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2LP
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SW 011LP
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2015 release. Giovanni Di Domenico's Duos With Guitars features Norberto Lobo, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Jim O'Rourke. Recorded during the course of three years (from 2011-2013) in various locations in Brussels and Tokyo, this double LP puts together three of the most uncompromising and original guitar players of the globe (there should have been a fourth great guitar player, the late Hans Reichel, but unfortunately he passed away days before asking him to join the project), all with their unique sound and approach to music and their instrument, all glued together by Giovanni's ever personal and forward music thinking. Three-sided LP; side four should have had a duo with the late Hans Reichel. This record is dedicated to him.
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