Artists: Levi
Title: Synthesis
Format: album
Release date: June 14th, 2022
Label: Black Marmalade
File under: electronica, experimental,
PR Territories: worldwide except Italy
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Levi is the solo project of Damiano Simoncini, italian musician from Pesaro already known in the international scene in the past decade as drummer and songwriter with the post-punk bands Damien* and Versailles.
Released on June 14th, 2022 by Black Marmalade Records, Synthesis follows the EP Aquarius (2019) and Liquida (2020).
Inspired by the visionary movies of Lynch, Bergman and Lang, akin to the sound ventures of contemporary composers as Oneothrix Point Never and Steve Auschildt, in love with the orchestral arrangements of the Maestro Ennio Morricone, Synthesis is the breed of the pressures and emergencies gripping both our inner and outside worlds, all related.
Heavy electronics creates almost hypnagogic states of mind, in a journey through different sub-genres looking for impossible answers about the near future.
Synthesis could be the playlist for a ghost radio station floating in deep, dark interstellar space: six tracks, less than 30 minutes, to focus the listening experience on our subjective perception of electronic-generated soundwaves.
Eurasia, like the whole album, was born during the first lockdown, in a state of global disturbance, at the same time adrenaline-charged.
In Levi’s case, this digitally shared loneliness was exacerbated by the unexpected deaths of two close friends: Andrea Guagneli (of the band’s Brothers in Law), dear friend and companion of many adventures and projects, and Mirko Bertuccioli, another musician killed by Covid-19, who’d been for many years the most active and enthusiast aggregator for the local music scene.
In this chaos of pain, anguish, melancholy and fear it came a sort of “epiphany”: the feeling that the world-as-we-knew-it changed, radically, and not just for health reasons .
“I clearly perceived the ‘collision’ between two different worlds, in some ways antithetical and incommunicable, and I sounded this feeling of ‘end of epoch’ and the beginning of another, more uncertain, darker, for sure unstable and fated to a sort of final confrontation. East versus West. Europe (and the West) against Asia (and the East). Hence the name Eurasia, seeking in the semantic crasis to show how stupid and useless divisions are, and how deleterious and devastating they can become. “
Eurasia sounds menacingly apocalyptic, with heavy drones building up to a psych-trance climax, with waves of sounds opening our perception, an attitude dear to musicians like The Telescopes, Sonic Boom, Dreamweapon.
The video is the recording of the live visual of the song created by Gabriele Ottino, a video artist from Turin and a member of Niagara, with whom Levi has been collaborating for years.
MEDIA LINKS
Luminous Dash (BE)
Da Music (BE)
Sélection Sortie (FR)
El Santo del Rock (MEX)
Radio U (FR)
Radio U – Spotify playlist
It’s Psychedelic Baby Mag – Lotus premiere
A GIANT LEAP 