FABRIZIO MODONESE PALUMBO
Ernesto and Fabrizio have produced the album "Canes Venatici" released by Blossoming Noise (2007) a live version of which they have taken to music festivals in Portugal and Italy.
"Trattato sulla natura delle stelle...", one of the tracks from the album, was used by the Res Pira Lab art gallery in Milan on the occasion of an exhibition inspired by Klaus Nomi.
Last year they have performed in Paris at Les Voutes.


EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW:
Fabrizio Palumbo and Ernesto Tomasini are two eccentric Europeans who have created a post-rock album akin to an inside-out glove depicting operatic sensibilities flowing down a minimalist drone river. Though they lampoon and transcend any stereotypical notion of so-called gothic music, the duo offers the musical equivalent of an operatic, crawling post-punk rendition of Antonin Artaud’s re-imagined translation of the proto gothic novel The Monk. (...)

Canes Venatici does hold reference points as the strange mixture alludes to Scott Walker (especially the later obtuse albums), Klaus Nomi and Marc Almond. What makes the album original is its over-the-top opera singing melded with maximum electro-acoustic structures.

Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo is best known for his work within the cryptic post reality rock band Larsen as well as Blind Cave Salamander. Ernesto Tomasini is a cabaret singer as well as a strangely beguiling successful comedian in the U.K. Their collaborative album pulls from both artists’ quirky uniqueness while also birthing something more then a sum of parts.

Canes Venatici [is] mesmerizing, (...) curves and drifts hypnotically (...) like a multicolored walk through an inside-out Lewis Carroll world (...) absolutely transcendent. (...) The lyrics are recited as if they were in the context of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. When Tomasini sings those first lines (...) a chill feels the air.

Though Canes Venatici offers merely six songs, each uniquely satisfies through atmospheric excursions forging with emotionally rich songwriting. Lush and lovely (...).

Tomasini and Palumbo offer dramatic, esoteric theatre for the disenfranchised lonely surging upon cultural fringes. If one wants to explore music outside the bland boundaries of American indie rock, Canes Venatici serves as perfect medicine. Where else are you going to find bent dark comedy, opera and minimalist maximum drone meeting with emotional depth?
Matthew D. Proctor, Stereo Subversion, April 2008.
.....................

ANDREW LILES

In 2006 Ernesto was approached by Andrew Liles for a collaboration. He has sung and narrated, in a variety of voices, in "Balck Widow" and "Black Sea", two CDs of Liles' "Vortex Vault Collection" (Beta-lactam Ring Records, 2007). He has performed with him at the Sala Apolo in Bacelona, at the Nurse With Wound concert, and at Rough Trade in London, before Liles' performance with Krautrock fathers Faust. In July 2008 Liles and Tomasini appeared together again with Nurse With Wound at the Wet Sounds Festival in London, this time in the first ever under water concert. The audience, swimming in the London Fields Lido swimming pool, enjoyed the performance through speakers placed at the bottom of the pool.


ReGen Magazine

Andrew Liles
Black Widow

Beta-lactam Ring Records

Wednesday, July 25, 2007
By: Matthew Johnson
Associate Editor

A pair of guests give this release a more vocal emphasis than previous entries in Liles' Vortex Vault series.

Part Four in The Vortex Vault ongoing series of rarities and collaborative works, Black Widow sees Andrew Liles bringing in a couple of guest vocalists: Urdu professor Dr. Malik and Italian cult performer Ernesto Tomasini. An eclectic mixture of Urdu, Italian, and English draws the album together in a loose thematic unity, while Liles' arrangements and studio work ensure an ongoing sense of eclecticism. Instrument choices range from primitive to classical; (...) Voice also plays a prominent role; "Uncle Alf" is a mysterious little narrative piece—like a Ligotti short story, it's somehow both innocuous and chilling—set to gently ringing ambient tones, for example, and "Dove I (Noodles and Cheese)" layers Italian speech over humming vibraphone. Only one selection, "To Maim a Donkey, Part III," is built around actual singing in the conventional sense. It's a sort of operatic nugget about... well, maiming a donkey. Conceptually, it should be offensive to opera fans and donkeys alike, but in practice, it's ridiculous enough that only the most humorless and ardent supporters of either could possibly take umbrage. Lyrics aside, Tomasini's vocal range on the piece is uncanny; he sings both the English and Italian parts, in tenor and falsetto, respectively, and sounds for all the world like two separate people. (...) At first listen, there's not a lot holding these tracks together, but Tomasini's campy performance and Malik's businesslike narration manage to pull things together in an unlikely cohesion. In any case, it provides further fuel for thought to Liles' already eccentric output and makes a welcome addition to The Vortex Vault.