mz002

mz002 – david maranha and gabriel ferrandini – a fonte de aretusa

(150 gr LP, 400 gr carton cover)* – 16.00€
(digital version available at bandcamp) – 7.00€

Press Release:

“A fonte de Aretusa” is the convergence between the legendary organist David Maranha and the free-form young revelation drummer Gabriel Ferrandini. Based in Lisbon, Portugal this duo started in 2010, with regular rehearsals and concerts that lead to this first album that captures a bloody free live act where the music is pulsing and vibrating over a droning flow of sound. 42 minutes (here divided in two, due to vinyl restrictions) of a massive attack to the listener among free percussive frames and brutal organic drone merging together into a powerful and permanent movement of vivid music captured in one of their first live performances at ZDB venue.

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side a – 21’36”
side b – 20’11”

david maranha – hammond organ
gabriel ferrandini – drums and percussion

* package contains internal code to get a digital copy

mz002_maranha/ ferrandini_1 by mazagran

mz002_maranha/ ferrandini_2 by mazagran

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“THE WIRE #333 / NOVEMBER 2011″
This Portuguese duo combines organ and percussion in a freeform context that has very little to do with free jazz. Maranha is less interested in playing recognisable chords or melodic runs, preferring to approach it as a mysterious generator of textures. One moment it’s growling like an angry wookie, the next it’s humming and whining like a maxed-out guitar amp. That leaves room for Ferrandini to provide the detail, rolling out a delicate tapestry of sustained percussive activity from drums, cymbals, gongs and chimes. Energy ebbs and flows in billowing gusts but just when it feels as if the storm is about to break, it dissipates back into simmering intensity. Once you learn to stop waiting for a decisive pay-off, the set follows its own perfect logic.” (Daniel Spicer)

SENTIRE ASCOLTARE 12/2011
The portuguese David Maranha is one of our “protected ones”. An artist that we often review and always respected for his ability to combine avant-garde forms with a sophisticated rock-structure, as in the excellent Marches of the New World or the subsequent Antarctica. In those cases, the”Velvet Underground-rock’ was the departure point to a process that resulted in longer pieces and modified the canon of this darken rock matter, that was handled through a obsessive capacity typical of the less heterodox minimalism and of the deepest timbric experimentation. In this “A Fonte De Aretusa” -a tribute to a mythic reflecting pool in Syracuse that always inspired many poets from Pindaro to D’Annunzio, from Milton to Pope- the Portuguese join his talent with the young and brilliant drummer, Gabriel Ferrandini, and move their vision over the most dark and limping avant rock. The combination hammond/drums do not lose obsessiveness, but the addition of a drumming so rich and pulsating make the droney flood of Maranha’s organ even more free to explore the most obsessive twists and turns of his musical inspiration, that is developed as more vital and incisive, hypnotic and cerebral than before. The record comes from a single live session at the ZDB in Lisbon and after divided in two cuts, one for each side of the vinyl that clarify, even if it was not necessary, the depth of the Maranha’s idea. In fact, he explained it in the special issue “Ad Libitum” a few years ago: his musical vision is a continuum without interruption that cames -the “osso exótico” experience and his solo album “circunscrita”- are two faces of the same coin. (stefano pifferi)

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