Recorded and mixed by Renato Fiorito
Mastered by Giovanni Roma at L’Arte dei Rumori (Italy)
All compositions by Antonio Raia, except #1 by Ernesto De Curtis / #5 by Rodolfo Favo / #9 by Errol Garner
Executive production by Pedro Costa for Trem Azul, Lisbon (Portugal)
Cover Photo by Luisa Terminiello
Released November 16, 2018 by Clean Feed [CF485]
Antonio Raia _ Tenor Sax
Asylum has been Fiorito’s most popular yet microphonic set up realized for recording an album.
For over a month they have been self locked in a dining hall of an ancient orphanage in the heart of Napoli, surrounded by microphones recording all day long researching every nuance of air vibration to capture the essential sound of Raia’s poetic saxophone.
Here is what Antonio Raia wrote about that experience:
“A chuckle or a grimace of memento, a shiver of rage or the same, but due to a steamy game and, most of all, a urge. Let the whole world in, and turn it out into an exploration, a clash of fire with this crooked, wooden, coppery, galvanized sort of dragon.
You cannot help but tailoring a path, especially if necessary to ultimately represent yourself, so you can either choose a so called neutral recording studio, in order to dry up and focus every shift, or seize live connections with people, a not-so-aware public capable of supporting the crystallization of that once-in-a-lifetime show.
To build Asylum up I’ve gone for the 3rd option: me (and my instrument) and Renato Fiorito along with his 10 mics, aiming to portray 1000 m of mere space.
In the very core of Naples, the whole Filangeri Asylum former dining hall played with us, in a harmony of wood and tuff, an everlasting patient background for the shifting valzer of thousands, a living, breathing, sizzling organism, bouncing notes and fragments of past and future lives, but also ticking together with leaving, stopping or passing by folks’ steps.
Looking forward to welcome and share freedom with a world in need of it, now more than ever”
