Living between Italy and Los Angeles, musician and composer Mauro Remiddi (AKA Porcelain Raft) has announced his debut album under his real name, Moonbird, which will be released digitally on November 25th. Moonbird is a decade in the making, more than an album, it’s the soundtrack to Remiddi’s original opera of the same name, a feat not only sonically but also visually.
“I imagined the music as symphonic and ambitious. The story instead had to be small, I wanted a seemingly insignificant event in our daily lives to become a portal to something mysterious,” says Remiddi.
Today he releases the second track from the album, “Do Birds Sing for Pleasure?”
Ahead of today’s announcement, Remiddi also released the first track from the album titled “The Bird Song”. The song is a kaleidoscope of sound and texture with Remiddi’s signature vocals.
The writing of the opera began over ten years ago and has been an ongoing process of collaboration with Remiddi and other artists, musical and visual, spanning all continents.
“The real progress started when I met some amazing musicians in Italy where I recorded Moonbird.” Anais Drago (violin), Simone Pappalardo (live electronics and DIY instruments) and Simone Alessandrini (sax and electric guitar) “Their approach to music was from angles I hadn’t even thought of. It was like an adventure joint, my first vision became a collective vision, which made opera a living thing.”
Moonbird’s music gives space for Remiddi’s androgynous voice to really emerge like never before, he sings like a ghost between strings, synth and drum machines. It’s a “chamber opera” as Remiddi likes to call it,
“In my head I heard the songs arranged with a baroque music style, I wanted the grand gestures of opera but done in a bedroom, with a do-it-yourself ethic, using what I had, which doesn’t want not to say sacrificing clarity to a spontaneous approach”.
After the music was finished, Remiddi asked artist and filmmaker Ra di Martino to film the story of the opera. Di Martino asked actress and singer Silvia Calderoni to play Moonbird on screen. The short film is currently presented as a video installation at the Museum of Modern Art in Italy, at MAMBO in Bologna and at the Mertz Foundation in Palermo.
The album is produced and mixed by Remiddi himself and mastered by his brother Manolo. Listen to the new single here:
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