Under My Bed Recordings: 10 years of secret mixtapes

The Under My Bed Recordings:

Side A
1- ONQ
2- Lebenswelt
3- My Shell
4- My Dear Killer
5- Baggage Claim
6- Campofame

SIDE A

Track 1

ONQ - La Confessione di Lato (UMB edit). ONQ is Luca Galuppini (guitar and vocals). Starting from its main activity, running a noise tape label in the early 90's, Luca Galuppini's musical interest later developed in a post-something project called ONQ. After 3 award winning CDr's and a 7" released in early 2000's, the project collapsed in a solipsism climax. Luca is now busy in his career in maritime logistics, and keeps himself busy in his spare time with optical microscopy, micology, woodcraft, cartography, infrared photography, mountaineering and interior design. The song which features in this compilation is a previously unreleased solo acoustic version of the opening track of "Canzoni tutte uguali", recorded in 2004 right after the electronic version you can listen on the album. It was recorded at Chupa Verga Studio on a Yamaha MD8 mini-disc recorder.

Track 2

Lebenswelt - When Your Eyes are Feral and Flicker. Lebenswelt is Giampaolo Loffredo’s musical project. It encompass a melodic, melancholic post-rock sound, enriched with the use of screwdrivers-prepared guitars. Lebenswelt has released three albums "Staring at life in the rain" (2003 - autistico project 001), "Out is the cow" (2004 - autistico project 002) and "Corners of a drowning faith" (2006 - autistico project 003). The song which appears in this compilation When your eyes are feral and flicker is an quasi-acoustic revision of a song which appeared in Staring at life in the rain, stripped down to its innermost core. The song was home recorded by G. Loffredo on a four track cassette recorded in his house, in Naples, several years ago, remixed and enriched by additional recordings for this particular edition.

Track 3

My Shell - Dead Horse. My Shell plays semi-acoustic, minimalist songs, pervaded by an intimate mood, enriched by sharp and cynical back-taste. It is a one-man band, Matteo Laudati (formerly in Nasten’ka and currently in Encode), born a side-project "da cameretta" in the middle of the nineties. Its songs are brief, almost improvisational, sketches, played on acoustic/electric guitar and, more rarely, on the piano, which used to be quickly cassette-taped on (very) questionable recorded, in a pure, barely compromising, lo-fidelity attitude. One of this session, entitled "The Baijkal" was released as an EP by Under My Bed in 2005, and a few songs of My Shell also appeared on UMB’s compilations. The song which appears on Ten Years of Secret Mixtapes, Dead Horse signs a cornerstone for this project, as it much neater recording, and the fuller harmonisation, also with aid of analogues synthesiser, shed a clear light on the song-writing too often otherwise submerged by hiss and hum of the good old magnetic ribbons.

Track 4

My Dear Killer - Nighttimes. My Dear Killer was born in the middle of the nineties as project aimed at collecting minimalist song-writing, stratified on a mesh of noise, ambient and field recordings. My Dear Killer sound has often been described as a kind of weird combination in between folk, alt-folk and guitar-based noise scene. This combination might sound vastly improbable but it is the landscape of sharp guitars, noises and violent feedback overlaid on top of the fragile melodic line arpeggios and the buried, whispered, daydreaming, murmured vocal which characterises its first LP "Clinical Shyness" (Boring Machines/Under my Bed), and a few split 7" with Prague (2005/EBS#1) and Rella the Woodcutter (2011/BM). Nighttimes is a much quieter song, about the incommunicability of love and the likes, its absence and the inevitable medication and consequences that this will bring. It was recorded by My Dear Killer, on the 20th of October 2001, in his bedroom in Vergiate (Va), Italy, with a Teac Tascam 80-8 Reel-to Reel recorder. The field recordings of children playing football, at Botanical Gardens and the see-saw noises at Hyndland Park, both in Glasgow, Scotland, were recorded a couple of years before.

Track 5

Baggage Claim - Where the horizon collapse. Baggage Claim is one of the many, parallel, variegated musical projects of UMB co-founder Marco Guizzi, the best known of which is "Fog in the Shell", having released two LPs "A Secret North" and "A Private south", as well as several EPs for Under My Bed. More obscure, to the limit of being completely unknown, projects, includes Iaia Fulva, Tascam, Pillow, Something Faded, all of which are part of the Fong collective. Musically, this project was born, and has lived, under a bed in a little bedroom, where else? After several years, has started to crawl out of the shadow, making an attempt at colonising naked-walled offices, under stairs cupboards, second-line- parked cars, and abandoned sofas in semi-strangers’ flats, by means of slow out-of-tune arpeggios, blended with DIY electronic and cheap guitar stomp-boxes filtered vocals. The song Where the horizon collapse is part of an unreleased EP, recorded by Marco around the Christmas season in 2010, in Milan. The full EP, still untitled, will be released by Under My Bed later on in 2012.

Track 6

Campofame - Tallinn. Campofame was born as trio (Marco Monica, Emanuele Missorini and Damiano Paroni), in Parma, in the late nineties. Their sound is, since the beginning, characterised by an ethereal, submissive tone, stemming from the blending of acoustic instruments and clear-cut electronics. In this formation the band has released two self-titled CDs in between 1998 and 2000, and has participated to the "pobox52" CD-series (Wallace Records). For a while the band expanded to other elements, noticeably to include vocals, and, in this latter formation has released a LP under the name In my room. More recently, they reformed a quartet (the original members and Pier Giorgio Storti, also of Morose) and returned to their bare instrumental scaffold, in which the songs architecture, embedded of sudden implosions and a palpable minimalist attitude, is designed to construct an almost physical space, enhanced by the superimposition of field-recording. In some case this space is left implicit, in others, as it is the case of their contribution to the compilation Tallinn, it is explicitly declared. Tallinn was home recorded, mixed and mastered by Campofame, in Parma

SIDE B