Marco Testoni

Biography
Press

Marco Testoni is a percussionist, caisa drum player and film composer. On 2008 he founded a percussionist ensemble called Hang Camera whose first album "Impatiens" featured the collaboration of Billy Cobham, the father of modern drumming. With the striking and suggestive sound of his set of Caisa drums (new generation metallophones belonging to the same family of the more famous Caribbean steel drums) Marco Testoni has once again brought out the capacity of percussion to fully express the ��lyricism of rhythm��, which represents the artistic essence and the manifesto of his style of music. ?In 2010 he founded the Pollock Project, a visionary ensemble built on the force of the intuition and the aesthetics of Art-Jazz which is able to conceive of a ��visual music�� with intense colours and surrealist references, so that the live act is intertwined with the visual arts and video mashups.

Gear

caisa drum set, percussions

Tags

"This latest project by the Rome-based percussionist, keyboardist and electronics manipulator Marco Testoni and collaborators Nicola Alesini (soprano, "Italian folk clarinet", electronics) and Di Loreto (percussion) is in part at least built around one of his favoured instruments, the caisa drum, a deeper-sounding relative to both the steel and hang drum (a metallophone of wood and metal, it has a gonging quality that invites comparison to gamelan, but with that cheerful carnival sing-song of its more famous relative). It's just one of a wide battery of instruments employed here to evoke moods that range from Brazil to Japan, via Collin Walcott's Pacific North West, Duchamp's Paris and, on the closing track, the spookier moments of Gavin Bryars's The Sinking of the Titanic." JOHN GILL, Paris Transatlantic