Tobia Poltronieri (Verona, 1988) is a guitarist, singer, and producer based in Cagliari.
For over twenty years, he has combined experimentation and improvisational practice with the song form, playing constantly with the C+C=Maxigross collective—which he co-founded—and collaborating with artists such as the late Miles Cooper Seaton (Akron/Family), Lino Capra Vaccina (on his debut solo album Casa, finalmente), Gabriele Mitelli, Marco Giudici & Adele Altro (Any Other), Alessandro Cau, and Marco Fasolo (Jennifer Gentle).
He has released around ten albums and performed hundreds of concerts on international stages, including Primavera Sound in Barcelona (with C+C in 2016, as the first Italian band in the official lineup), live sessions recorded by the BBC (2017) with the Miles Cooper Seaton Trio, performances at Cafe Oto in London (2016, led by Seaton alongside Oliver Coates and Lætitia Sadier), and sessions with the Abstracta Collettive conducted by Eric Chenaux (2024, still unreleased).
He has also been chosen as an opening act by artists such as IOSONOUNCANE, Paolo Angeli (for his entire 2018 theater tour), andDaniela Pes.
Among various records, he has produced Emma Grace (Trovarobato), Banadisa (La Tempesta/Trovarobato), and Kokomoon (Urlaub dischi). Every month, he hosts "Cordata" on Radio Raheem, a radio show dedicated to avant-garde guitar music.
About the album:
Coming from an undefined space, dispersed sounds open a room in an old house, where the furniture speaks of dust and the cotton bed sheets, locked in the wooden wardrobe, have become the den of spiders who are now the landlords. It is the past that determines the present, and our ancestors watch us from a nearby constellation, approving the musical tribute that Tobia Poltronieri recorded in the places and spaces we inhabit every day.
It is as if the music of this record took the spirits who inhabit those rooms by surprise, capturing them at random, impressed in an old sound-picture.
The film indeed has the taste of the past, yet it is enriched with colour and with meetings with friends and collaborators from yesterday and today.
A free approach, one that plays with sound landscapes, jamming with moments of solitude and nocturnal contemplation.
The guitar is the master, whose voice keeps the thread of the plot, while the sound palette is enhanced with electronics, tapes, and voices from beyond.
From the rooms to the garret, we are led outside now, then onto the paths of rural Sardinia and into Verona’s alleys, celebrating each step without rush, enjoying each pause and each view: a waterfall and a mill, then, keeping an eye out for snakes, and letting ourselves sail on the wind aboard a vessel on a night at sea, stars in the sky.
La voce della padrona is a fifteen-year sonic meditation, developed through journeys and gigs around Europe. I gathered dozens of sound fragments, recorded on tape dictaphones, four-track cassette recorders and digital devices.
These non-moments could happen between live shows, before sleep, or just after waking: impressions of that half-sleep state in which the conscious mind wanders lightly, free to create without superstructure.
For more than twenty years, songwriting and releases have been my main creative output. Voice and lyrics have usually driven the meaning of the music I made. Being able to get lost in sound, with no ulterior purpose—no need to turn it into songs—has been freeing and cathartic.
Hundreds of these “stolen” fragments were born simply to dwell in my sound trays. Yet I kept reopening and listening to them, again and again: like memories of past lives, recalling moments I barely remembered and the places in which they had been caught in time. A sound journal of the unconscious. A map for fading memories.
Eventually, those lost memories called to me strongly enough that I felt it was time to release them. I began selecting and combining the fragments into a liminal path wandering between the Lessini Prealps, Gallura and southern Sardinia, Café OTO in London, Labirinto della Masone, and, of course, the Veronetta neighbourhood, where I lived and composed for many years.
These jams are not exclusively solo experiences. Musicians and dear friends—Miles Cooper Seaton, Alessandro Cau, Luigi Pinarel and Zeno Merlini—were invited to interact with my earlier pieces.
One of the last fragments caught in time is the one with which the album ends, recorded on a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser I had just bought from a neighbour. Its selected preset was “Ladyvox”. That synth track reminded me that, despite the instrumental nature of the record, a distant, lulling voice had silently guided me over the years.
The double-exposure photograph on the front cover contains a portrait from almost two hundred years ago, which has stared at me from my grandmother’s home since childhood.
