Andrea Giordano is a young Italian, Oslo-based experimental composer-vocalist investigating how acoustic instruments can be augmented by electronic means. She completed a master’s in jazz and performance at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she was a student of Sidsel Endresen. Since 2018, Giordano has been creating vocal works in Piedmontese, drawing upon ongoing research into her family’s Gallo-Romance northwest Italian dialect. Her recent works included the solo project «exapist euforia», duo collaborations with Fanny Meteier and Eivind Lønning, and an upcoming interdisciplinary project with Kjell Bjørgeengen.
Giordano’s chamber ensemble project Àlea, in which she performs as a vocalist, is a suite dedicated to the memory of Giordano’s friend and mentor, the Italian jazz musician and pedagogue Alessandra Giachero, who died unexpectedly in 2020. The album’s title has tripartite origins: it references the Italian for «to Alessandro» («à Ale» tweaked as «Àlea»), a not to the aleatoric nature of his death, and an epithet of the Greek goddess Athena, chosen to express Giachero’s wisdom reverberating through future generations
Giordano has used the dialect of Piedmontese, endemic to her native city of Cuneo, in her previous works. For Àlea, she commissioned Italian composer-songwriter Vieri Cervelli Montel, a friend of both Giordano and Giachero, to write two imaginative texts in Italian that she and Montel then translated together into her hometown dialect based on her interviews with scholars and family. The tracks for this work were recorded separately at the Norwegian Academy of Music in April 2022 and assembled later, and are like separate rooms («stansias») within the same house, each an individual expression of tension, repetition, and ceremony. This nine-movement suite begins as a pensive choral lament but develops in surprising courses and adapts to more enigmatic and sparse, sound-oriented terrains. This impressive, introspective work blurs the distinction between imaginative and untimely folk music, contemporary minimalist chamber music and abstract electronics.
Eyal Hareuveni
Andrea Giordano (voice, organetto), Alessandra Rombolà (flutes), Cosimo Fiaschi (soprano saxophone), Ferdinand Schwarz (trumpet), Joel Ring (cello), Kalle Moberg (accordion), Emanuele Guadagno (guitar), Lara Macrì (harp), Ingrid Hjerpseth (organ), Christian Meaas Svendsen (double bass), Nicholas Remondino (percussion, Gran Cassa), Ingar Zach (percussion, Gran Cassa, vibrating membranes)
