Alessandro "Asso" Stefana - Alessandro "Asso" Stefana

“This mysterious and beautiful music by Alessandro Stefana entrances me. Its fragility and tenderness bring comfort and understanding. It reflects the unique sensitivity of its creator, who has drawn on his experience to bring this profoundly moving, and life affirming record to the world.” - Polly Jean Harvey, Executive producer

"Achingly beautiful music from my beautiful friend!" - Mike Patton

Celebrating his first album, we've dedicated a limited Diggers Factory version on clear vinyl with a matte-varnished jacket.

The musical journey of Alessandro "Asso" Stefana, hailing from Brescia, Italy, is a compelling one, and if you’ve heard PJ Harvey’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane, Calexico's El Mirador, or Micah P. Hinson's I Lie to You, Penguin Cafe's Rain Before Seven..., or listened to Guano Padano’s output on Ipecac, you’ll have encountered him.

The musical journey of Alessandro "Asso" Stefana, hailing from Brescia, Italy, is a compelling one, and if you’ve heard PJ Harvey’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, Mike Patton’s Mondo Cane, Calexico's El Mirador, or Micah P. Hinson's I Lie to You, Penguin Cafe's Rain Before Seven..., or listened to Guano Padano’s output on Ipecac, you’ll have encountered him.

This album sees Asso perform an eclectic array of instruments and in varying genres, borrowing from rootsy folk and primitive blues to soundtracks, psychedelia, desert ballads and ambient explorations. He also dives into the Smithsonian Folkways archives, repurposing the voice of Roscoe Holcomb to create poignant interplay between past and present.

Each track across the album fades in and out like a sonic vignette or fragments of emotion situated in sound. A variety of instruments from different epochs emerge on the album, blending together in musical alchemy. From relatively obscure or nearly forgotten instruments of the early 1900s, such as the Marxophone, to pedal steel and lap steel guitars, tape echoes, psychedelic organs and folk fingerpicking.

On the second half of the record Roscoe Holcomb’s voice appears, taken from the precious Smithsonian Folkways archives. “It is a powerful and moving testimony to a bygone era… I have always been fascinated by the idea of mixing folk, a music so intimately linked to the land, with something that goes beyond the boundaries of the genre.” One of Asso’s aims for this album was for it to feel “suspended between earth and sky” - the interplay between decades old recordings with new improvisations evokes feelings of being grounded and untethered at the same time.

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