Litfiba is an alternative hard rock Italian band with amazingly melodic elements, active since 1980. Exceedingly prolific, with a discography consisting of an enormous body of work, that contemplates full lengths, EP’s, compilations, live albums and many more, Litfiba is a highly regarded, powerfully sustaining and exceedingly original band, that has seen little success outside of Italy, perhaps due to the fact that their songs are sung mostly in the Italian language. With almost forty years of existence, the band consists of founding members Ghigo Renzulli and Piero Pelú, with a revolving cast of additional musicians.

Despite their metal outfit and influences, the sound of Litfiba fluctuates between hard and alternative rock, with the prominence of melodic elements, solidified by massive and highly concentrated doses of guitar lines. In their early days, punk and new wave influences mostly shaped the sound of the group, that, over the years, evolved to a more distinct rock sound.

An indisputable representative of a diversified and stylish authorial sound, Litfiba has yet to be regarded beyond borders. Little success outside their native Italy, however, apparently never was a source of concern. Despite their international potential, Litfiba acquired such a large fan base in their home country, that little effort was put on a prospective career outside their homeland. This feature probably made them more and more confortable over the years with their own language, since singing in English became rarer, as years passed by. Today, singing in their native Italian language has become a distinctive feature of their style.  

The sound of Litfiba is somehow difficult to define or categorize. Aligned in a mostly alternative rock “indulgence”, their style seems to fluctuate into the heaviness of metal, without becoming metal de facto. Melodic guitar lines serves as the basis of a characteristic style, easily identifiable, that for a long time now serves as a recognizing sonorous feature for the band.

Being such an incredible act, it is a shame that they are so little known outside their home country. With such a remarkable potential, Litfiba should have been bigger, but they had preferred to remain authentic! Singing in a native language other than English is a genuine act of courage and non-conformity, that not only will limit the scope and the achievements of a band, but will greatly diminish its potential throughout the course of its career. In a predominantly anglophile world, to sing in English is an easier way to become mainstream, and specially, radio friendly. But being an impressive, highly skilled and exceedingly authentic band, Litfiba shunned all of these features, in favor of creating and building a conceivably genuine artistry, which shows that they are not just amazingly skilled musicians, but brave and original artists as well!!    

Front Line Assembly is a Canadian electro-industrial band, established in 1986. Having completed thirty years this year, the band founded by singer Bill Leeb is now one of the great avatars of the genre, with a reputation solidified by a worldwide notoriety, that highlighted them as one of the most significant acts of the genre. A prolific band, having released so far sixteen full length albums – besides EP’s, live albums, compilations, demos and a lot of other releases in different formats – the band members are also deeply involved in other musical endeavors and side projects, which shows their unorthodox and dedicated commitment in everything related to music. 

With a prominent and characteristic style, that gave the industrial genre a more flavored pop appeal, without becoming a de facto pop band – on the contrary, soberly maintaining at the core of their sound the pulse of industrial music – Front Line Assembly now has amounted a legacy that only a handful of bands have being able to achieve.  

With significant line-up changes throughout the course of their career – obviously, on such a long journey, this would be inevitable –, the band has been also deeply influenced by different styles of music, having experimented with other genres as well. Sometimes creating a very unique sound, blending and amalgamating diverging sounds, they eventually always returned to their roots.

With songs sometimes inclined to highlight a more somber, evasive and sinister side of existence, with melodies equally melancholic and disturbing, but nevertheless abundant on beautifully stricken harmonies, the band certainly has impressed the strength of their style at the collective mind of all the band’s fans and genre enthusiasts alike, being impossible not to recognize their sound immediately, that by now is almost synonymous to industrial music. 

Always active in the studio and in live performances as well, Front Line Assembly apparently has a lot more to contribute. Although they are a very well established act with a respectable legacy and a very solid journey, they keep producing and writing music, always eager to do more, and expand their body of work. 

Obviously, there are no limits for what they can achieve. On a road that has as a main goal the creation of beautiful music, and nothing more, we certainly can expect always the best, and nothing less, from Front Line Assembly. Being that kind of band that only gets more and more confident and more and more excellent as time passes by, never declining or reducing its pace, Front Line Assembly was designed to shine, create, challenge and perform. Simple as that.     


​Wagner

Tim Bergling, better known by the stage name of Avicii, is a Swedish house music record producer, DJ, songwriter and remixer, that achieved worldwide notoriety in the beginning of the decade of 2010’s. One of the most recognizable faces of contemporaneous electronic music, he is a household name easily spotted in electronic music festivals worldwide.

Exceedingly involved in major musical collaborations with a lot of artists, Avicii is certainly one of the most prominent talents of house music and progressive house today, in a worldwide basis, although he also works in another electronic music genres. With a very recognizable musical style, Avicii, still young, being only 27 years old, has the world ahead of him. With his amazing talent, a great capacity for creating uplifting beats and very exhilarating rhythms, with an arduous fan base that loves everything he does, and waits anxiously for his next releases and projects, Avicii has the world at his feet. Really, there is someone, in the electronic music sphere, that does not like what he does?

A worldwide celebrity, with his work as a remixer being heavily commissioned by the likes of several famous artists and musicians, as well as several successful partnerships – that occur also outside the electronic music scene – with acts and artists like Coldplay, Madonna and Wyclef Jean, Avicii has proved himself to be gracious, eclectic and limitless. What can we expect of him? Everything that is marvelous, wonderful and out of the ordinary. He’s a very well established influence and a remarkable reference everywhere in the mainstream musical arena.  

For someone who’s still very young, and has such a recent career, his immense success is formidable, but proved the greatness of his musical abilities, given the enormous acceptance by the public. Now you can say that an electronic music festival without Avicii is no electronic music festival at all. 

Only the future can say certainly what the days to come keep for this amazingly talented Swedish DJ, composer and songwriter. Nevertheless, his worldwide fan base sees only his talent spreading more of his light, in songs, endeavors and collaborations that will be better and better. Unfortunately, in what concerns touring and live concerts, Avicii shocked the electronic music scene this year, by announcing that he would retire, because of poor health concerns. Having being hospitalized before in one occasion, Avicii apparently played his last concert in Ibiza in August 28. With health problems, the several additional difficulties that came out with touring take a toll on the artist. Nonetheless, at least he will not stop making music. No matter what his decisions turn out to be, he certainly deserves support from his audience. And we will always be here, waiting for his wonderful songs to be released.   


​Wagner

bandcamp

From the dark forests of an unknown dimension of solitude and melancholy, arise the music of A Bleeding Star, artistic vehicle for the dark ambient musician Alex Goth, that in the early morning hours of March 13th 2008 revealed to the world his first creation, that would set up the pattern for the music created by A Bleeding Star: a translucent archaic void, emanated by   a tense atmosphere of gloom, completely prepared to captivate its listeners, and take them to otherworldly dark dimensions. 

With an undeniable stream of creativity, A Bleeding Star soon started to produce an overflow of the most imperial, magnificent and desolate dark ambient music ever created. Having already made a lot of demos before officially introducing his music to the world, they somewhat provided to the artist the basis for his future works. As Alex Goth, in his own words, has said:

“'Tis important to mention that many demos were found before the first "Dark Offering" ...as
well...these were known to become the [blueprint] of the artist himself...kind of like a broken
well full of stories needing of a home...chapters from incompleted books of deep recollection...
Soon all these tales would be relocated in their appropriate section...coiling through volumes
upon volumes of content...switchshifting from the physical realm to the astral in mere seconds.”


After the success of ‘Dark Offering I - Specteral Demonstrations of My Deathly Dissolution’, A Bleeding Star started to reveal more of his “Dark Offerings” at the website 'last.fm', always in the 13th day of each month, at 3:am, the perfect time and place for ABS to reveal his music to his audience, the darkest hour of the morbid desolation, a time that perfectly converges and aligns itself with the ghostly atmospheric ambitions of ABS music.  

Always working tirelessly to deliver to its audience the best dark ambient music ever created, ABS overflowing creativity produced some of the most emblematic underground dark atmospheric albums you will ever have the chance to listen to, being an outstanding and daring creative force of the genre, as it is possible for him to be. A great soul working for the exasperate catharsis of a funeral planetary isolation, the groundbreaking genius of Alex Goth, regarding his creation, is yet to see the limits of his creative capabilities, as no dark offering is out of limits for the marvelous shadows and hostile landscapes of A Bleeding Star.   


​Wagner

Wolves and Horses is an ambient project by Belgian musician Christian Saint-Viteux. A self-taught musician, and former radio host, Saint-Viteux started to privately compose his own music in 2013, which has as main inspirations his greatest passions: fantasy literature, medieval history and Native American culture. Deeply influenced also by classical writers, such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire, as well as more contemporary ones, like J.R.R.Tolkien, John Steinbeck, Dan O’Brien and Cormac McCarthy, Christian Saint-Viteux manages to perfectly unite all of his passions, painting in his mosaic of creative confluences a dark scenery that masterly reverberates the cold desolation, the bold intensity and the overwhelming beauty of his ecstatic, but somberly deep sound, produced under the alias Wolves and Horses. 

After contacting Christer Lunder, CEO of UAE Records, himself a skilled musician, main component of the ambient drone project Us As Effigies, Saint-Viteux soon felt at home at UAE. Soon both musicians started to combine their talents for a song, then their idea evolved to work together for an entire album. Their joint musical efforts and creative collaboration soon gave birth to a project, named FirstFallingLeaves. As their partnership only grew over time, soon Christian Saint-Viteux was incorporated as a staff member of the label for organizational purposes, becoming a main component of UAE Records.

When creating a new song, Saint-Viteux goes far beyond the ordinary means. Aiming to create an atmosphere able to evoke a whole new set of otherworldly inspirations, his art is moved by the goal to set free the listener’s imagination, setting a new pattern of rapture that, driven by a fantastic sound, captures emotions never seen before, and creates extraordinary worlds in your mind, in your heart and in your soul, far distant from the reality zone, as his main objective behind Wolves and Horses is to take the listener into another time, another place and another life, with the music working as an outstanding vehicle that gives you the passage to this fantastic alternative dimension of fogs and dust, kings and thrones, myths and legends, that Saint-Viteux amazingly creates with his inspiring art.    

Imagining his songs also as a soundtrack for short movies, little pieces of imagery, or even brief moments frozen in time, his equipment and method of compositions also changed over time, to better adjust to the Wolves and Horses main perspective, and fit into Saint-Viteux’s dreamscape objectives. About the evolution, changes and development of his techniques over the years, Saint-Viteux has said:  

“All W&H tracks are based on pads and soundscapes I create for every new one. I started with ‘classical’ synths but I wasn’t completely satisfied, so I moved step by step to more ‘organic’ sounds, using granular techniques and sound manipulation.”

Creating also all the visuals for Wolves and Horses, Saint-Viteux manages to progressively delineate a world of his own in several aspects, building for himself a cohesive artistic identity, where music is not only an appreciative parallel accessory, but a force driven to amalgamate his desire and his ability to create a new world, where the old patterns of boredom, tragedies, deception and grievance of ordinary life have all been long forgotten. With Wolves and Horses, imperial transcendence, lost kingdoms made of stone, gray forests foreshadowed by ghostly hallucinations and never-ending seas of haze set in your mind a perpetual state of freedom, where all invisible, but possible realms of life are in the domes of light, not as a mere possibility, but as a true reality, built by the spark of his creative ambitions.  

Wolves and Horses music is the perfect vehicle to let your imagination wander around free, throughout a marvelous sound, that built whole new worlds, note by note. The first Wolves and Horses release was an homonymous five track EP, released by UAE Records on May 25, 2015. The first full-length Wolves and Horses album, titled “Every Moment Of Light And Dark", was released by the label in December 14, 2015. Currently, a new Wolves and Horses album is in progress. 


​Wagner