Cleopatra (EP)

Available for purchase on Bandcamp and Mirlo.

This is probably my most ambitious project so far: a 27 minutes long symphonic rock instrumental on Cleopatra. It was originally released as an appetizer from my Musae album, with the 27 minutes long song devoted to Cleopatra divided in the different narrative chapters it is made of (it is a single track on "Musae", instead).

I had this work planned for more than 20 years, now, when I first conceived what ended up becoming the "Cleopatra's Fanfare" chapter of the song. It took me a long time to finally sit down and organize the song in different thematic chapters, and then work on composition and arrangement. Musically speaking, while it can be defined symphonic rock/metal, it's much more orchestral oriented, with guitars taking an accompaniment role instead: there's no solos at all, and only occasional riffs taking the lead. As such, I see it more as a soundtrack, or a long rock opera suite, if you will. Despite it being split in separate tracks in this EP, it is supposed to be listened in sequence and as a single song, since that's what it is: Cleopatra's story narrated with music and thematically.

All recorded, mixed and mastered using open source and free tools: thanks to all the software authors for making this possible! In particular, I want to give a shout-out to Fedora Linux, Pipewire, JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK), Ardour, MuseScore, Lilypond, Guitarix, Rakarrack, DrumGizmo, Hydrogen, Virtual Playing Orchestra, Yoshimi, Surge, LinVST, Dragonfly Reverb and sfizz: all those projects rock, and are what made this possible.

Credits

• Vocal intro by Serena Miniero
• Drums played by DrumGizmo (Muldjord Kit)
• Audio samples obtained on freesound.org and The William Shakespeare Project
• Cover picture by Frederick Arthur Bridgman (Cleopatra on the Terraces of Philae, 1896)

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