Fassbinder Wunderkammer by Alessandra Novaga

Alessandra Novaga is a Milan based guitarist, involved in new and experimental music, and improvising. She has been working, among others, with composers such as Paula Matthusen, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, all of whom wrote scores for her. Her realizations of textual and graphic scores often include a makedly performative component, departing from conventional ways of interacting with the instrument.

She has performed in Europe and in the United States. She played, among the others, at Cafe OTO and Hundred Years Gallery (London), Quiet Cue (Berlin), O' (Milano); in New York City she played at the Transient Series, the Incubator Arts Project - Ontological Hysteric Theater, Zebulon, Silent Barn and at Spectrum. She was part of the performance Sight Inseen directed by Lee Ranaldo and she was the first, and unique, guitarist to perform the entire cycle of John Zorn’s Book of Heads in Italy.

Her last two solo albums are La Chambre Des Jeux Sonores (Setola di Maiale), Movimenti Lunari (Blume). Alessandra is a graduate of the Musik Akademie Musikhochschule der Stadt, Basel (Switzerland).

released January 1, 2017

recorded by Giovanni Isgrò
mastered by Maurizio Giannotti
photo cover Laila Pozzo
Setola di Maiale


This record is about R.W. Fassbinder and his cinema. Fassbinder has been an extremely prolific auteur creating close to forty films in the course of 36 year of a dramatically intense life characterized by nearly superhuman activity and a desperate search for affirmation and acceptance. In his films, he took on different genres, from the gangster movie, to a brave examination of the Nazi period still too recent for the Germans, to a more bourgeois cinema in which he cast a light unto human relations, which he regarded as characterized by bullying, psychological violence, a desperate need for love. The music for all of his films was composed by Peer Raben and it adheres so closely to the atmospheres of Fassbinder’s cinema that I always think of the two men as a single person. After years of turning around this idea, finally here’s a record in which coexist many different energies and forms. It collects arrangements of some of Peer Raben’s wonderful themes, which have been my main source of inspiration, and sets about a journey through the many identities Fassbinder was able to embody with his unique voice.

www.alessandranovaga.com

alessandranovaga.com