Spell/Hunger is the Italian, Bologna-based duo of prolific sax player Piero Bittolo Bon, who plays alto (his main instrument), tenor, and baritone saxes, and electronics, whose interest in finding new sounds and new improvisational languages brought him to design a special microphone system allowing him to control and play the feedback that is generated inside the saxophone tube, and drummer Andrea Grillini who adds electronics to his arsenal. Bittolo Bon and Grillini collaborated and recorded in the last decade with Bon’s Bread & Fox and Yotuba, Tower Jazz Composers Orchestra, and Rex Kramer trio.
The self-titled, debut free improvised album (and Bandcamp-only release) of the duo was recorded live, with no overdubs (except pump organ and voices on one piece) at Jambona Lab in Livorno in March 2022. The eerie and whimsical artwork by Iranian, Istanbul-based experimental artist Parsa Mostaghimhints, made specifically for the duo, hints about the sonic unorthodox, and unpredictable aesthetics of Spell/Hunger.
Bittolo Bon and Grillini are restless sonic searchers who channel their hyperactive, intense electroacoustic explorations through a primal and disorienting, improvisational language, yet rich with an array of extended breathing techniques and augmented feedback effects, and with shamanic rhythmic patterns and twisted sax voices that kick the ancestral, ritual-like echoes into the provocative, punkish theater of the absurd. Each of the eleven, short improvisations – or sonic collisions – begins with a simple pulse and compressed melodic spell (and with absurdist titles like “pangolin summoner”, “anus vs anthem” and “bite the beaver”), but soon the duo’s dynamics become hungrier, wilder, and stranger until it disintegrates in a dense, cathartic chaos.
Piero Bittolo Bon (alto, tenor, and baritone feedback augmented saxophones, electronics, pump organ, voice); Andrea Grillini (drums, electronics, voice).
