AS YOU can pretty much deduce from the photo, Patrick Belaga isn’t your common or garden cellist.
Classically trained, natch, he loves to bust out of convention – whether that’s collaborating with performance artists such as Wu Tsang, or scoring Lady Gaga’s Netflix documentary. Life – and music, and art – are for living.
His new album, Blutt, is conceived of as being music for an unruly imagination. If you feel you own one of those, come and delight in how expansively off-kilter the track he’s dropped in advance, “The Tunnel Is A Tower”; beginning in spectral electronica, part-Warp Records circa 94, part-water filled glasses, it’s about as post-classical as you can get; echoing and woozy, pretty but unstable, always ready, seemingly, to slide off through the cracked mirror.
Conceived at the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula in Apulia, Blutt was inspired by a contemplative road trip with a friend, and mysterious muffled music heard from an unidentified source, some overheard hybrid of jazz and classical that accompanied Patrick’s wanderings through Gallipoli, in Turkey; soon this music became abstracted through his dreams to emerge from that prism as a record that needed to be written and recorded.
Patrick Belaga’s Blutt will be released digitally and on vinyl by PAN on April 2nd; you can pre-order your copy from Bandcamp, here, or Rough Trade.
For more on Patrick, visit his website.
