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Two of Italy’s foremost players, Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics) and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar), come together with David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), one of the key figures in US music of the past decades.

Four years of semi-regular live shows have turned this esteemed trio from a studio-bound hibernation unit to an extroverted rock (or what’s left of it, or what’s beyond it) trio. Their latest album, Dust & Mirrors follows 2010’s Onrushing Cloud LP, which quickly sold out (Julian Cowley wrote in The Wire that “this trio show that understated, oblique and sensitively paced musical narrative can still command our utmost attention”) but which will be issued by Grubbs’ Drag City imprint Blue Chopsticks for the first time in April 2014. If Onrushing Cloud represented a single stylistic arc in which these three first found commonality and shared musical means, Dust & Mirrors dramatically widens the terrain in which the group operates and sees them exploding outwards from their more steely, contemplative beginnings.

Between albums, the three musicians have worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album The Plain Where the Palace Stood, and taken part in Grubbs’s and visual artist Angela Bulloch’s performance piece The Wired Salutation (presented at the Pompidou Center and Berlin’s Tanz im August).

Berlin-based Andrea Belfi is a drummer, electroacoustic musician, and composer. Recent recordings and collaborations include Hobocombo, The Swifter, Evangelista (with Carla Bozulich), and Il Sogno del Marinaio, with Mike Watt and Stefano Pilia.

One of the most influential musicians of his generation, Brooklyn-based David Grubbs recently released the solo-guitar 10” EP Borough of Broken Umbrellas, is the author of the book Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (Duke University Press), and has played in Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and a whole bunch of other groups. There is a free talk with David before the gig here.

Bologna-based Stefano Pilia is known for his solo recordings and his participation in the group ¾ Had Been Eliminated; more recently he’s been active playing with Rokia Traore, In Zaire, and Il Sogno del Marinaio.

 

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