2010, Dashdot, an ImprovRelease

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download @ Bandcamp

This is my last release (May 2010), available on Bandcamp. It contains tracks taken from my posts on the ImprovFriday website.

All tracks are improvised and played live looping with my EDP+ and effects.

ImprovFriday is a community of musicians and sound makers joining from each part of the world, from Thursday to Saturday of every week of the year.

The moderators (usually, J.C. Combs, Steve Layton...) set a thread and the members, under the flag "improvising or bust", post their audio tracks to share. Every week, hours of music and sounds that goes from ambient to minimal, from noise to field recordings, are posted free to listen and download, commented by this active community. It is a good creative pool where one can share ideas, projects, techniques, new collaborations come to life. There are blogs, forums, social media, weekly events such as livestreaming gigs.

A perfect place for an artist who has no creative boundaries.

USIT = Gaetano Fontanazza & Jeff Duke

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About two years ago on Facebook I had the honor to meet Jeff Duke and his music. He is a really creative and talented ambient guitarist based in Ocala, Florida. Soon we had mutual repect for our music and we found a very similar creative approach. One day he told me that there was an online system called Ninjam. This protocol is used by many artists in the world, and let two or more online musicians play together in a virtual jam session. Morover, using a specific DAW software called Reaper, musicians can record their sessions into separate tracks for further editing and mixing. We cought this as a perfect chance to play together and see if our worlds, 6000 miles apart, could have been joined. Since 2009 we had several sessions, in which we found a common feeling in improvising ambient electronic music. It was a weird situation, we felt a kind of brotherhood even if we didn't meet in person. Later we had the opportunity to meet in real life at the Y2KX International Livelooping Festival. In that week, October 2010, we shared not only our music, but even the same hotel room, the same car (we used to call it the "USIT mobile"), we spent a wonderful week of music and brotherhood, together with the other loopers as well.
This is the birth of USIT, our 6000 miles wide ambient guitar duo. We made also online streaming concerts, using separate webcams, images, hosted in websites. We played really together :-) our liveset at the Y2KX. We released on Bandcamp 3 albums. We will continue meeting online hoping for a next real reunion, who knows...
Click on the covers below to listen and download our music

Check out this video excerpt of our set at the Y2KX.

The "Gnostic Guitar" volumes

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Gnostic Guitar Vol 1
(follow your instinct)

Moving my first steps into “live looping” in 2006, I realized that improvisation could be an interesting approach to follow. Mostly is near to my creative criteria. This is the basis of the Gnostic Guitar concept.

In the blog area of my profile in Myspace there are few lines explaining what I intellectually wanted to mean with "Gnostic Guitar" or whatever... Click here to read it, and good luck!

How I did it? Simply recording my improvisations with guitar, loop and effects into a single stereo track and choosing the more interesting takes later. The only editing I made was only cutting some redundant sections.

Then, it was natural collecting the tracks into an album named Gnostic Guitar Vol 1 (yes, Vol 1! I wouldn't stop with this one).

In these years something deeply changed in distribuiting music, both in indie and major contexts.

Since then, I “produced” my releases as much nice and less expensive as possible (just like any other unsigned artist) and distributed to friends or occasional fans in livesets and gigs or sent them to magazines for a review.

But now... now there's the world wide web! Not that this implies that anyone can be a superstar but I think there are more chances to reach the right audience.

And so, for me, it was. I met online Robert Nunnally and Verian Thomas who managed the netlabel Negative Sound Institute (NSI). They released Gnostic Guitar Vol 1 on March 2007.

In about three years GG Vol 1 gets more than 2500 downloads and it is reviewed in specific ambient websites. I'm glad about this. I can say that my new “ambient season” started from here.

Here are the links to download your free copy of Gnostic Guitar Vol 1

download @ Negative Sound Institute netlabel

download @ Bandcamp

download @ Jamendo

Gnostic Guitar Vol 2
(layer your instinct)

About an year later GG Vol 1 was released, I started composing Gnostic Guitar Vol 2.

I wanted to take the concept of “extemporary composition” to a next level, composing songs in which the improvisation was layered. So, the recording of the first track in each multitrack recording became a kind of leading thread for the further takes.

GG Vol 2 appear to be a collection of short songs, an exhibition of faceted sonic paintings. You can identify recursing themes and schemes. This is certainly due to a not well defined rationalizing process... The album opening has lyrics too.

Just like any other music experience I had this one artistically enriched me.

NSI released Gnostic Guitar Vol 2 on october 2008.

The sharing policy of this netlabel brought my music to some video artists attention. Sam Renseiw in particular created several videos with soundtracks taken from both releases. Here it is my blogpost with all these clips collected.

Here are the links to download your free copy of Gnostic Guitar Vol 2

download @ Negative Sound Institute netlabel

download @ Bandcamp

download @ Jamendo

Ambient guitar 2.0 personal upgrade

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There's a statement I usually put in my social media profiles, and it is this: “For me as for many others, everything started with Brian Eno. I never played guitar the same ever since”.

For me it started about in 1985... but I won't bore you... Let's jump to more recent times.

While already committed in making experimental and electronic music with the project NenTE since 2000, about six years later I was encouraged by the chance to promote ones music world wide in the Internet. So I resumed some music ideas set aside and decided to play ambient music as a solo again (the NenTE activity still continues its life). I wanted to renew my gears. I bought some rack mounted effects, I discovered the Looper's Delight website community and I felt that “live looping” would be one of my “ways”. I bought an Echoplex Digital Pro+ from an Ebayer from Tucson (it was impossible to find this loop machine in Italy) and started playing exploring the sonic chances offered by my brand renewed rig.

I wouldn't have bet a buck if someone told me I would have met many of the talented artists active in LD few years later at the Y2KX International Livelooping Festival in Santa Cruz, CA.

This is a picture from my profile on Myspace, the caption says "Ambient construction devices"

Ok, let's see in the next posts what I've done with this, during the following years...

Who am I?

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I'm a musician.

No, I'm not a pro. Maybe years ago I haven't had the required will and determination to make music my job for living. Yet, it would have been the natural path of my life. A graphic designer in a publishing house, that's what I ended to do for living. And... yes I live in Italy, south, deep south of Italy, at the center of an island between sun and sea that someone calls Sicily.

I'm not even much young anymore, but passion in making music never left me and never ended.

I played almost every kind of music, except for Jazz and Classical, I have not the required technical basis for that.

One of my main interests is making ambient music. I'm a guitarist who likes "having fun" with loopers and effects. But I can produce sound almost with everything, if necessary... (LOL!)

There's nothing intellectual in my music. My approach is mostly made up of instinct and emotion. I rather prefer intellectualizing after the creative process, if necessary. It's just a way to know myself better.

I act like an explorer who has surprise for everything but he knows when something great is found.

I've been criticized an appreciated. I had my “15 minutes fame” sometime.

I don't like to list what I've done.

I rather prefer to post my past, present and future with sounds, links, players, toughts, verses and bla bla bla

Ah, and... sorry for my English. In this and in any other future English post. Cheers

(This is the English version of my very first post in this blog made in may 2010)

USIT - Somewhere in the ocean of night - nuovi dischi (Parte 2)

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Quando io e Jeff Duke abbiamo messo mano al materiale che avevamo registrato dopo Approaching, abbiamo capito che avevamo roba sufficiente per pubblicare non uno ma due dischi. E così l'abbiamo fatto! Evviva la musica libera dall'industria discografica!

Mentre Reunion raggruppa le tracce registrate dopo l'esperienza del Y2KX, questo Somewhere in the ocean of night raccoglie l'editing delle sessions registrate prima o subito prima di ottobre 2010. Le tracce sono infatti tratte da audio a cui successivamente abbiamo fatto il video o da "prove" per il nostro set insieme in California.

Il risultato è un album decisamente più cupo del primo, più "a ruota libera", ne è la prova il "flusso di coscienza" sonoro dell'ultima traccia. Un unico audio di 24 minuti che si snoda fra i tortuosi sentieri della nostra mente improvvisativa.

Cliccate sull'immagine per scaricare Somewhere in the ocean of night
- l'ascolto è gratuito
- il download è "name your price" (fate voi il prezzo)... anche gratis scrivendo "0.00"

USIT- Reunion - nuovi dischi (parte 1)

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Dopo l'indimenticabile esperienza del Y2KX International Live Looping Festival lo scorso ottobre 2010, sono ritornato al tran tran quotidiano tralasciando anche un po' il live looping e la musica ambient per dedicarmi a progetti lasciati in sospeso e che, ahimé, ancora oggi lo rimangono... vabé ma questa è un'altra questione...

Insomma, con molte cose da fare e pochissimo tempo per farle i miei contatti con Jeff Duke si sono molto diradati in questi mesi, ma la voglia di fare musica insieme è tutt'altro che scemata.

Abbiamo così raccolto i mix delle nostre sessions post Y2KX in un nuovo disco pubblicato online su Bandcamp lo scorso luglio.

L'abbiamo chiamato Reunion, per ovvi motivi... perché dopo aver suonato virtualmente per un anno e dopo aver condiviso una realissima settimana di musica e amicizia in California, ci siamo "riuniti" di nuovo online, arricchiti dell'esperienza diretta. Ci sembrava la giusta continuazione dopo il nostro debutto con Approaching.
La formula è la stessa: hard-ambient, due chitarre molto looping e manipolazione sonora, improvvisazione, connessione Ninjam/Reaper pochissimo editing successivo.
Lascio commentare a voi cosa significhi questo, in termini di "esperienza di ascolto"

Cliccate sull'immagine per scaricare Reunion,
- l'ascolto è gratuito
- il download è del tipo "name your price" (date voi un prezzo). potete scaricarlo anche gratis.