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| sps26122 ALESSANDRO SGARITO / ROBERTO MARES RIFUGIO PER MILLE PERSONE CD, 6-panel digisleeve, ltd. 200 copies |
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| “Rifugio per mille persone” is a place before it is an album. A sonic shelter built by Alessandro Sgarito and Roberto Mares starting in November 2024, through a slow process of listening, layering, and waiting. The nine tracks that make up the record move between ambient, post-rock, electroacoustic, and new classical music, shaping suspended, essential soundscapes permeated by silence. Contributions to the album come from Helga Raimondi (Dictaphone), Laura Bisceglia (Teho Teardo, Blixa Bargeld [Einstürzende Neubauten]…), Fabio Capanni (Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Peter Principle, Luc van Lieshout of Tuxedomoon, Harold Budd), and Fabio Puletti—presences that enter the sound with delicacy, expanding its space and depth. The title originates from a real place: a World War II air-raid shelter located in the garden of Roberto Mares in Belluno. Designed to accommodate up to one thousand people, this underground space becomes a metaphor for the album itself—a place of protection, suspension, and shared listening. “Rifugio per mille persone” does not seek urgency or noise. It asks for time, attention, and presence. It is music to be inhabited, like a shelter: slowly, allowing sounds to do their work.
Born in 1976 in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, Alessandro Sgarito has lived between Trentino, Emilia, and Rome. After graduating from the DAMS program at the University of Bologna and gaining various work experiences, he began his professional career as a photographer in Rome. Together with Stefano Gallone, around 2010 he co-founded the ambient/post-rock duo Agate Rollings, with whom he released Lost Battle against Failure (self-released, 2012), Glass (self-released, 2014), Diomede (Databloem, 2016), and Meantime/Elsewhere (Midira, 2022). In 2023 he released his debut solo album Il Giorno Prima (Shady Ridge Records), followed in 2025 by Appartenenza (Shady Ridge Records), his second solo album. Also in 2025, Lago was released, the debut album by Adieu.Reset, a musical project in which he plays bass alongside Alberto Bitonti, Simon Fedrigo, and Dutch singer Merel Van Dijk. He is currently working on new productions with Roberto Mares—already a guest on Appartenenza and a collaborator on Mares’ album No Place on Earth—as well as with painter and musician Luca Giordana. In the field of cinema, together with Stefano Gallone he composed the soundtracks for the documentaries Il Mago di Lodi and Il Paese Interiore, and for the film Il Mare Nascosto (featuring Ascanio Celestini), in collaboration with pianist Ewa Dominika Lorek. In 2025 he also composed the soundtrack for the documentary film Indietro Così! directed by Antonio Morabito Roberto Mares is a graphic designer and musician. Drawn to sounds suspended between electronics, new classical music, and experimentation, he creates sonic landscapes that blend acoustic and electronic instruments, influenced by minimalism, ambient music, and film scores. After his early involvement in the 1980s new wave/post-punk scene and his studies at the Scuola Popolare di Musica di Testaccio in Rome, he developed a personal language that intertwines timbral research with visual sensitivity. Over the years, he has collaborated with numerous artists and collectives, including the Koan Loop Ensemble and MOORPIE, an improvisation group founded in Belluno in 2011. In 2023 he released Something’s About to Happen, his first official album, featuring Julia Kent, Sara Ardizzoni, and Massimo Fantoni, followed by the single Only Happen Now with Fabio Capanni. In 2025 he released his second album, No Place on Earth, featuring musicians such as Merel Van Dijk, Flavio Ferri, Alessandro Sgarito, and Matteo Visigalli. During the same period, he created the live music for the theatre production AH – Fragments Not to Forget, based on Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler and Stefano Massini, with Fabio Sala and Alberto Montresor: a project of civic theatre that combines sound, word, and image to reflect on the present through memory. He has also collaborated on Alessandro Sgarito’s album Appartenenza, on the singles Grecia/Gricia and Deep Song by Luca Giordana (piano, electronics, and strings), and on the debut album by the post-rock band Adieu.Reset, where he plays soprano flugelhorn order |
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