Luca Miti

Featuring: Terry Riley, Laurie Spiegel, Alvin Curran, György Kurtág, Gigi Masin, Enrico Piva

2005 release ** "What we are here presenting is one of the most intimate releases  Ants has produced ever. Luca Miti is a “strange” kind of composer and musician. And organizer, too. He has the uncommon attitude to make private experiences and let them become “public” in a very natural way. Primarily known for his compositions (most of them unconventional and ”experimental” in the best sense) and impro-live-written collaborations, he’s also a “perfomer” with many different sides. One of these aspetcs is shown in this album. This is really an “album” in the broader sense. "The longest piece on offer in this idiosyncratic recital of piano music played by Luca Miti is Terry Riley's late 60s Keyboard Study #II, and even if Miti tends to rush over the phase shifts a little it's still one good reason for getting hold of a copy of this album. I can think of two more: Sylvain Chauveau's Radiophonie, in which Miti's clanging piano chords are accompanied by blurred fragments of radio broadcasts (there's even a snatch of Coltrane in there), and his reading of Tom Johnson's Long Decays. The other pieces on offer are slight affairs, both in duration and substance. The name of the game is minimalism, but we're talking the lightweight pastel stuff, not high-intensity drone bruisers like Laurie Spiegel, Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad; in their concern for simple gestures using unashamedly tonal harmony, a lot of the pieces hark back to the glory days of English experimental music – Anna Guidi's era tanto tempo che non mi succedeva could be a bar of early 80s Bryars or Skempton. The slowmotion carillon of Francesco Michi's Passatempi e giochi d'attenzione n° 3 is touching, as is the title track, a one-minute haiku of a piece by Welsh composer Paul Burnell (who's done some rather cool things with scores in the form of musical squares), and Gigi Masin's crunchy harmonies on Tootle make a welcome change from the bland twiddles of Gilbert Delor and Enrico Piva (par for the course scale / arpeggio figurations with incremental changes, been there, done that)"

Composer and pianist, Luca Miti was born in Rome in 1957. He studied jazz piano, extended vocal techniques and baroque flute “a bec”. From 1980 he worked as a composer and performer of contemporary music. His work is centered on a deep research, beyond "sound". He has worked extensively with the likes of Albert Mayr, Francesco Michi, Alvin Curran, Mauro Orselli, Michiko Hirayama and others. His repertoire consists of "hard to find"compositions (Keyboard Studies by Terry Riley, works Takehisha Kosugi, lesser-known compositions by Alvin Curran). And he’s the dedicatee of works by Tom Johnson, Pauline Oliveros and others.others.