Band: Don Antonio
Album: s/t
VÖ: 07.04.2017
Label: Santeria / Rough Trade
Website: www.facebook.com/donantonioofficial
The Italian Touch according to Don Antonio.
A man, a record, a true story, a southbound trip.
One of the few true internationalists of Italian music, Don Antonio Gramentieri keeps raising the aesthetic bar across his heavy schedule, always bringing his very personal spices to every table he's invited to. Sometimes with his Sacri Cuori trademark line up, sometimes alone. Jumping from the record producer’s seat to the live stage, from music for movies to theatre to ballet, Don Antonio's special taste in brewing interesting sounds and vision, re-inventing and re-twisting the wheel of tradition, has become more and more in demand.
DON ANTONIO – the man – is a guitar player with a style, and a producer with ideas.
Leaving (and always coming back to) his small town in the verdant vineyard-hills of Romagna, he has toured the world several times, shared recording sessions with David Hidalgo, Jim Keltner, Marc Ribot, Evan Lurie, Steve Shelley, Howe Gelb and many others, performed as a very special tour companion (and very often as a record producer) with Richard Buckner, Dan Stuart, Hugo Race Fatalists, Terry Lee Hale, Alejandro Escovedo, Friends of Dean Martinez.
And in the meantime he composed scores for Sky/Fox, had songs picked up by VW for commercials, he turned knobs and bent strings in studios from his homeland Romagna to Melbourne, from Los Angeles to Bristol, from Tucson to New York.
He had some of his songs sung by M Ward, Isobel Campbell, Hugo Race, Howe Gelb and more.
And finally, the stars align for his first solo effort.
DON ANTONIO - the record - is a mercurial, multi-faceted, mostly instrumental album which connects the trademark "Adriatic twang" of Don Antonio with distant memories of the American blues and southern European melodies, like a Dreamliner cruise ship reaching a different shore every day. Defining a brand new perspective on the sound of Italy in 2017.
A cinematic, romantic, exotic, no-compromise affair, DON ANTONIO was recorded mostly in Sicily with a revolving crew of special guests. The continent as a backbone and the sea in front, hands on the soil, the sirocco wind blowing Asian and African perfumes in the face.
Absolute beauty and Absolute kitsch dancing hand in hand in the Mercato Square.
DON ANTONIO is the sound of a Mediterranean world slowly tilting off its axis, mixing up the west and the east, the north and the south, the past and the present. A sound which defines the contemporary Italian identity as an elusive-yet-fascinating work-in-progress. In times of walls and closed borders, it is a sound which might - despite the irony and the sometimes nostalgic, good-times touch - even contain a political edge. Always with that unmistakable touch. Who can say no to Don Antonio?
