Verdiana Raw (I)

(official homepage) Verdiana Raw is an italian musical project, born in 2010 and based around Verdiana Maria Dolce (alias Verdiana Raw / voice and piano), supported by Antonio Bacchi's guitars and Fabio Chiari's percussions.

Verdiana had a classical musical education, she early studied violin but she quitted it as she decided to explore in her own personal way a larger range of artistic expressions, including theater. Years later, in Palermo, she turned back to her musical path by many collaborations (for instance with Sergio Bonfiglioli): she mixed her voice with piano, keeping focus on her vocal virtuosity.

Antonio, guitarist influenced by the new-wave scene and its furthers processing, grew fascinated by the 80s music mood of his town, Firenze, but he left music ambitions because of his work career and social commitment untill, during 2009, he finally decided to put things in order in his life and restarted a new musical path which has brought him to meet Verdiana one year later.

Their first common experience was the collaboration with the Extreme Body artist Alexandre Fuser, as they accompanished on stage his performances in several dates.

Meanwhile they worked out their music project: starting by Verdiana’s piano and voice songs, they added new parts reinventing them. Piano and voice were still the key of the sound but now guitars twisted around them with delicate and dreamy sounds, dark and ironic at the same time.
After one of their live shows, they met Fabio Chiari, a percussionist and “tabla-ji” characterized by a ritual rythmical style, thoroughly matching the original mood and meaning of the project.

The compositional music work took a further step: rhythm parts or light percussion inserted, depending by the cases, completed the pieces while new songs were written exploring different instrument solutions.

In 2011 "Verdiana Raw" played live sessions with the new line up. Their interest for contamination between different stylistic forms of artistic expression, made them experimenting on stage, for example through the use of esoteric symbols drawn by laser beams, used to control sound samples, or even alternating readings and other performances as inserts of Butoh dance movements performed by Verdiana during the concerts.

In summer 2011 they met the artist Maria Teresa Vitelli Partenope, of "Officina Parnaso", which promotes the Art Brut movement diffusion through her research and video-making. All "Verdiana Raw" members are interested in mental disorders theme in relation to art, as they are involved in this ambit with different approaches. The collaboration with "Officina Parnaso" came out naturally as a tribute to artists such as Sarah Kane, Alda Merini, Janet Frame, Dino Campana. Officina Parnaso created the first videos used by "Verdiana Raw" during their live shows.

In the meanwhile Verdiana collaborated with other artists and, at the same time, carried out her studies of music therapy. She joined the electro-acoustic composer Alessandra Panerai to participate as singer and performer to her multimedia work "Il Mar delle Blatte", inspired by the tale of the visionary writer Tommaso Landolfi. Moreover she started a collaboration with "Ouroboros": they wrote together the song "Janua Inferi" and she partecipated to a performance including music and physical ritual, in purely symbolic and esoteric terms. She is also co-author of the song "Noche Oscura", from a poem by the mystic Juan de la Cruz, written with the Neofolk / Medieval band "Gargamella".

During the same year "Verdiana Raw" met the film maker Marco Cei that wanted them as authors of the soundtrack for his first movie: "Vitrum", a film between thriller and horror but at the same time very intimate, whose debut is expected after summer 2012.

Finally, in the autumn 2011 "Verdiana Raw" entered studios to record the songs for their first album: Metaxy', a music work over genre limits, in which lives the essence of the project and the summary of these early years of intense artistic activity.