Francesco Serra (born 1980) is an Italian guitarist from Cagliari who lives and works in Bologna. His music research focuses on performance practices aimed at expanding the timbre qualities of the electric guitar, emphasising the evocative potential of sound and exploring possible contaminations among sound, space and image.

He started recording solo under the name Trees of Mint in 2008, progressively deconstructing, in the span of three albums, his initial approach to song structure through sound experimentation. Indeed, if his first self-titled album of 2012 had elicited a (distant) comparison with musicians such as John Fahey, Loren Connors and Alan Licht, with Untitled in 2017, NW in 2019 and the latest Guest Room published by I dischi di Angelica, Francesco Serra undertook a “reductionist” and abstract journey comparable in its rigour to the music of Alvin Lucier or Phill Niblock – not so much in terms of similarity, as in making the physical manifestation of sound and its interaction with the surrounding space one of the cornerstones of his research.

Starting from a minimalist electroacoustic setup (electric guitar, two amplifiers, three snare-drums, a loop machine), his latest album Guest Room is the result of a residency that took place during the closure of the headquarters of Angelica | Centro di Ricerca Musicale – Teatro San Leonardo in Bologna due to the pandemic, and is born out of the intent to interpret the acoustic identity of this peculiar space (the theatre is a three-nave former church, originally part of a convent). Seven microphones positioned like spokes of a wheel under the vault of the central nave allowed to record the sound, enriched by the refraction on the surrounding surfaces. In the span of a month it was possible to fully document the signs of a physical presence in the place, without leaving out any of the accidental acoustic events that took place during the performance.

The three tracks born out of this experience therefore represent immaterial projections of an architecture suspended between intentionality and contingency.
Entirely performed in real time and without overdubbing, Guest Room is a work of austere fascination, which confirms Francesco Serra as a musician-researcher of both rigorous poetics, and charming results.