“Arriving in Barcelona to perform at Primavera Sound during the 2011 Indignants protests was the spark that ignited the inspiration for this record, and the Arab Spring revolutions unfolding across the Middle East as we wrote the album further fuelled our inspiration” (Francesco Carlucci).
Over the past decade, instrumental trio STEARICA (Torino, Italy) have gained a cult following in the independent music underground, touring and performing live with the likes of Girls Against Boys, NoMeansNo, Dälek, Tarentel, Damo Suzuki, Coliseum, and forming the Acid Mothers Temple and Stearica Orchestra, which recorded a full-length album during the last day of a glorious one-month European tour together.
The key to STEARICA’s success is their powerful and adventurous sound, which is geometrical yet visceral: so intense that there is no need for words – much like “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. This is especially the case live, whether in clubs, crowded festivals such as “Primavera Sound” and “Villette Sonique” or in their live film soundtrack of the 1920 silent horror masterpiece “Der Golem” (commissioned by and performed at the National Cinema Museum and winner of the “Audience Award” in the 2014 Rimusicazioni Film Festival).
Their desire to go ‘beyond’ the traditional concept of a band has also led them to begin work on an ambitious multimedia show.
STEARICA’s second album, Fertile, will be released worldwide by Monotreme Records in April (UK release date 13/4) – during Spring, the season of renewal and fertility in many parts of the world including the historical region where the sun rises known as ‘The ‘Fertile Crescent’, the birthplace of some of the earliest human civilizations, and also the scene of the revolutionary political uprisings that swept across the Middle East in 2011 known as the ‘Arab Spring’.
Both the concept of ‘fertile’ as ‘life-giving‘ and the revolutionary impulses of the Arab Spring and the Indignants protests in Barcelona provided inspiration for this latest work from STEARICA, who begin their creative process by freely improvising for several hours. These torrents of sound are then edited into finished songs, just as a receding flood leaves behind fertility-bringing silt. Listen to lead track Halite here: https://soundcloud.com/monotreme-records/stearica-halite/
Produced by band member Francesco Carlucci, Fertile captures the primordial nature of the sound that the trio creates in their dynamic live performances. At times brutal, chaotic, mysterious, tranquil; Fertile is music born of our time: instinctively revolutionary.
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The album will be available on CD and a deluxe 180 gm double gatefold edition of 500 with a free poster and album CD included inside: 300 copies on red and black vinyl and 200 copies on black vinyl. All vinyl copies include a free album CD in a printed card wallet.
