WEGE by Andrea Belfi

Wege translates as ‘path’ and it’s a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums’ four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape.

Wege is Belfi’s forth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Belfi has developed a complex musical network of possibilities.

With this electro-acoustic system, influenced in part by Steve Reich’s ‘Pendulum Music’, Wege’s four pieces revolve around spiraling interconnections of synthesizer, feedback and drums. Belfi explains further:

“This device creates feedbacks on two drums on my drum kit, and I can modify it by stopping and stretching the drum skins with hands and various kinds of sticks, mallets and brushes, and/or by filtering the feedback with an a modular synthesizer.”


Edited in a quiet apartment in Greifswald (Germany) a small town on the Baltic Sea, the record bears marks of the stillness of the surroundings in which it was finalised. There is a sense of hushed awe and a subtle reference to the wind swept coldness of the landscape in these pieces.

Wege is mastered and mixed by Giuseppe Ielasi.

With this electro-acoustic system, influenced in part by Steve Reich
credits


All compositions by Andrea Belfi

Recorded by Ludo Engels at Q-O2 Werkplatz, Brussels, October 2009
Additional recordings by Andrea Belfi, Greg Haines, Valerio Tricoli, Stefano Tedesco, Rutger Zuydervelt, Massimo Carozzi, Attila Faravelli
Edited by Andrea Belfi
Mixed by Andrea Belfi and Giuseppe Ielasi
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi March 2011
Design by Hartebeest

Impossible without: Ann Goossens, Julia Eckhardt, Ludo Engels, Veronica Santini, Heimo Wallner

“You have no concept of just how much a lone kettle drum can blow your mind until you've heard Andrea play one.” – Mary Anne Hobbs via The Guardian

andreabelfi.com