Shaloma Locomotiva Orchestra

* Contains 24 Pages Booklet-poster with photos and texts * For more than a decade, the versatile musician and composer Mirco Mariani has been pursuing a unique experimental journey on song-forms through the parallel projects he founded: Saluti da Saturno, eXtraLiscio and Fwora Jorgensen. Since 2014, AngelicA festival has produced and commissioned to Mariani several special projects of variation, extension and new arrangement of these groups’ repertoire.

The record Shaloma Locomotiva Orchestra documents, for the first time, two of these special events: the concerts for octet on 19th and 20th May 2014 at the Teatro Comunale Luciano Pavarotti in Modena and the Teatro Rossini in Lugo, and the one for quintet hosted by AngelicA in its own Centro di Ricerca Musicale / Teatro San Leonardo on 15th January 2016.

Fascinated by the extra-ordinary sounds of the vintage instruments around which he built Labotron, a laboratory/recording studio open to the most diverse collaborations, for these concerts Mariani surrounded himself with guests from the most varied musical backgrounds. Mitchell Froom from the USA (producer and instrumentalist who worked with Tom Waits, Paul McCartney, Los Lobos and Suzanne Vega, among others), the trumpet and flugelhorn jazz player Paolo Fresu, the guitarist Jimmy Villotti (Guccini and Paolo Conte’s historic collaborator), the French virtuoso of the ondes Martenot Bruno Perrault and Gianfranco Grisi with his cristallarmonio (an “organ” made of glasses) joined his usual team of collaborators (Massimo Simonini’s “prepared theremin”, Mirko Monduzzi’s guitar/bass, Christian Ravaioli and Michele Orvieti’s mellotrons). With their sensitivity and their instruments they further enriched the sound palette of these live concerts, within which dreamlike melodies and gentle rhythms merged with primitive and original drum machines, the soundscapes of progressive keyboards, elegant traces of jazz and distorted guitars.

Produced by Mitchell Froom and Massimo Simonini, the CD was mostly mixed in California by David Boucher, former sound technician for Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen and Rufus Wainwright