Marco Giongrandi – Songs
After spending several years working with singer-songwriters, jazz players, and improvisers, co-writing songs in different languages and pondering the meaning of either writing or improvising music, I have embarked on a new project featuring my own songs.
The songs are in English, I’d say that they’re about what I love and what I fight and they might have a touch of Nick Drake, Sufjan Stevens, Velvet Underground. Alongside me in this adventure you’ll find my dear friends Hendrik Lasure, Casper Van De Velde, Soet Kempeneer, as well as one or two guitars, a banjo sometimes, a piano, some synths, a bass, drums, some bells. The first part of the upcoming album was recorded in November 2022 in Destelheide, Dworp (BE) by the great Christophe Albertijn; the second part was recorded in June 2023 in the same place with the same people. We mixed and mastered it and, after having obtained the support of the FWB, we’re looking for a label. Further news will be out soon.
Dear Uncle Lennie
Dear Uncle Lennie is the new project of pianist and composer Camille-Alban Spreng. A bit like Japanese haiku, each song of the 1st album of the band represents an idea, a fantasized story, a furtive image towards a picturesque landscape. The short pieces follow one another, mixing jazz, folk, and improvised music, and create a mythological fresco whose stories would be told without words, by musical evocation and with the help of the listener’s imagination. The first album of the band is made of 18 short songs and was primarily inspired by the sounds of Marco Giongrandi on the banjo and Benjamin Sauzereau on the guitar. The piano strings were muted or prepared to match the esthetic dictated by the unique blend between those two sounds. The music itself was inspired by the American Secession war stories, the concept of storytelling, cornfields, and songwriters such as Leonard Cohen, Patrick Watson, Sufjan Stevens (to name a few). A second album, with the clarinettist Joachim Badenhorst as a guest, was recorded in May 2024.
Hendrik Lasure Warm Bad
Warm bad was founded by Hendrik Lasure during the summer of 2017. A saxophone and piano quartet augmented with three guitars: it opens up a wet but warm sound palette that sounds intimate and spacious at the same time. Lasure’s compositions balance on the edge of the tonal abyss, searching for the rich no-man’s land between harmony and dissonance, between abstract sounds and the tangibility of a pop song. Improvising drives the band members to spill the bath water over the edges. Together they explore vast plateaus of sound, navigating past islands of songs that slowly capsize in improvisation, from which emerge the outlines of a composition. After Lasure’s duo without vowels SCHNTZL, warm bad is a big band without capitals, that with a wealth of strings (22 in total) still dares to sound sparse, and reveals a wealth of colours in the multifaceted sound of the ensemble.
Kettle of Kites
Kettle Of Kites is an Indie Art Rock band. Their debut album Loan was formed through humble means – recorded in a little Italian Basement by Scottish frontman/songwriter Tom Stearn and then sent half way across the world to A Pocket Full Of Stones Studio in Australia to be mixed. Embarking on the launch of their Sci-Fi inspired studio-album Arrows, the band’s geographically dislocated members (Pietro Martinelli, Bass – Genoa // Marco Giongrandi, Guitar – Brussels // Riccardo Chiaberta, Drums – London) combined their peculiar experience in their respective music scenes to contribute to the uniqueness of this work. Arrows is inspired by the Sci-Fi world of the author Isaac Asimov. The band is currently working on their third album.
ANK, Chansons Rebelles et D’Amour
(FR) Ça parle d’ours, de naufrage, de barricades. Ça rit, ça s’insurge, ça console. Si on identifie des influences anglo-saxonnes – un son à la Tom Waits, Johnny Cash ou Alexi Murdoch -, on reconnaîtra aussi des accents du jeune Gainsbourg, de Nougaro, d’Annegarn, de Prévert voire de Belin. On perçoit en Nicolas Ankoudinoff un berceau familial où tout le monde fait de la musique. Lui, flûte traversière puis saxophone, touche un peu la guitare, puis suit des cours d’improvisation, de composition, de rock de chambre au Conservatoire de Liège. Il forme alors le groupe de jazz alternatif Animus Anima – qui sortira trois albums, compose aussi pour le théâtre, le cinéma, la télé et joue régulièrement avec des poètes (Pierre Guéry, Tom Nisse, Serge Noël). La scène, la musique et le texte l’accompagnent, l’envie de la chanson s’enracine. Premiers concerts et cabarets, rodage en solo… puis formation d’un groupe, avec Nicola Lancerotti à la basse électrique, Théo Lanau à la batterie et Marco Giongrandi aux guitares. Chansons Rebelles et D’Amour, premier album du groupe, est sorti en Mai 2023.
Honolulu Orchestra
Honolulu Orchestra is a collective band that features all the current members of Honolulu Records, an independent record label created in 2014 in Milan by a group of Italian musicians now spread in four different European countries (Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium and UK). Each member of HO composes for the band material that gets workshopped and modified during the rehearsals. Honolulu Orchestra is also the musical manifesto of the label itself and carries its artistic message. The band released its first album S//T in December 2019 and Ambergris (single release) in December 2020. The single Whose Home : was composed and arranged by Marco Giongrandi.
Fabian Krestel THE LABYRINTH
Since 2021 I’ve been working as a musician and composer for the contemporary circus show “The Labyrinth”, created by Fabian Krestel. Here’s how Fabian describe the project:
“The “Labyrinth” explores the link between process and product, seeking playful ways to visually translate movement patterns within controlledframeworks. Drawing from circus knowledge, it aims for interdisciplinarity, playfulness, complexity, simplicity, and beauty. Through investigating physical necessities tied to movement, like balance and imbalance, it seeks playful forms that evoke both visual and experiential results—traces and events.An abstract juggling approach captures essence: movements, ambidexterity, precision, geometries, compositions, patterns, variations, playfulness, mathematics, lines, and dots. In juggling, danger’s absence allows freedom, where “failure” lacks physical harm. Organic, almost perfect structures with “mistakes” intrigue—a human touch. Sharing parts of the creative process engages the public in creation. My proposition aims to uncover new aesthetics, guiding the audience through juggling’s intricacies—offering glimpses of the joy and fear in learning circus arts. “
Soares
In April 2015 Departures, Soares’ first album, has been released on Honolulu Records. Soares present their work full of different artistic connections: within it is possible to find, besides a strong musical background, references to multiple artistic fields. Inspired by different situations and authors, such as Antonio Tabucchi in the opening track “Il Filo Dell’Orizzonte”, every track represents a little tale which, through rarefied and twilight dyes, aims to involve the audience in a walk from the main theme of the inquietude until a hopeful and bright ending.