Musae

Available for purchase on Bandcamp and Mirlo.

Nine muses, nine tracks. A collection of compositions from the past five years, all inspired by, and devoted to, different women in history and mythology, or feminine figures that for one reason or another were my muses at a certain point of my life.

Musically speaking, it traverses different genres, from folk to world music, progressive rock, metal and beyond. Considering all compositions were written at different times (Cleopatra was finished and released as a separate EP just a couple of months before publishing this, while Eurydice dates back to 5 years before that), the mixing is admittedly not always consistent. I tried to fix this a bit, re-recording some parts and aligning them to my latest "style", but there was only so much I could do without dragging this on forever, so I decided to just release them as they are.

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, JACK Audio Connection Kit (JACK), Ardour, MuseScore, Lilypond, Guitarix, Rakarrack, DrumGizmo, Hydrogen, Yoshimi, Dragonfly Reverb and sfizz: all those projects rock, and are what made this possible.

Credits

• Guest vocals on "Mary", "Scheherazade" and "Cleopatra" by Serena Miniero
• Drums played by DrumGizmo (Muldjord Kit)
• Audio samples obtained on freesound.org and The William Shakespeare Project
• Cover picture: Roman mosaic of the Muses (Torre de Palma, National Archaeology Museum of Lisbon, Portugal)

© All rights reserved