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Born in Naples in 1964, De Simone lives and works on the outskirts of the Neapolitan metropolis. He is an Italian pianist, composer, and musicologist, and is one of the main exponents of the musical avant-gardes linked to frontier music. Deeply influenced by his encounters with Luciano Cilio and John Cage, he has collaborated with some of the most important contemporary composers, including Pietro Grossi, Giuseppe Chiari, Ludovico Einaudi, Tuxedomoon, Michael Nyman, and many other protagonists of Italian and international music. "Child of all and no style, born from the classical but projected elsewhere by itself. Dispersed, dissipated, yet anchored to this 20th century that struggles to leave us after exploring every fragment of note. The challenge, and the drift, of the musician is among the grooves. A treasure hunt to face listen after listen"
The latest work in a career rich in ideas both in sound and in prose form is "Ai piedi del monte", produced by Hanagoori music and KonSequenz. It's an album that recreates a conciliating atmosphere, of delicate abstraction from the everyday, in places where kindred spirits can meet within the warm walls of solid memory. It's an atmospheric, intimate album. The environment that embraces it is overwhelmed by a balance of intimate and bucolic forms. You hear a musician at play, with musical forms and territorial snapshots that are closest to the heart. You observe a man recompose his roots in a delicate intertwining of people, places, sounds.
The first track, "Fabula" is a point of no return in the listener's awareness. One gets the impression of rising and soaring on semantic planes of an unprecedented and encouraging salience.
Listening to the album is a search for spiritual identity, and this becomes evident in the contrast between the whispered twilight of "Ave", a delicate bluish night on the piano hinting at a potential revelation, and preparing for the ecstasy of "Ultima prece", a clear sky of distant spring afternoons, children running more innocent than the earth they tread upon.
"Il tramonto e Donizetti" is a less-trodden path, as well as the compositional peak of the album. A journey that opens up, enveloping, step by step. The sun, hinted at in the sunset of the title, lowers and rises, like the emotional shore of an uncertain awakening, in days when life becomes heavy without the music (the shore par excellence) necessarily becoming grave if one has the awareness/authority to transfer it into acoustic rooms, in the stormy mind.
The "Canto dell'Arco" vibrates spirals of sounds aiming towards a vortex of infinitesimal peaks, through the peculiar and uncontaminated joyful sound of the spinet.
The album closes with "La Verna", which is a warm and sinuous experimentation, a mystical ecstasy.
The final sound of bells sublimates an album of intimate passions, their echo spreading in the air caressing the horizon, the sunset, and, if he can hear it, Donizetti.
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