GRÜN
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Biografía
- Daniele De Santis is a Berlin-based percussionist, drummer, electronic music producer and musical instruments creator from Bari, Italy. Grounded in jazz, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern percussion styles as well as in electronic music and sound engine..While working as session and solo percussionist/drummer in the fields of contemporary jazz improv and chamber music for many years, De Santis has all the while tread a parallel path in the electronic music realm as producer, prolific performer and editor/curator being the mind back Dromoscope platform. GRÜN, his most prominent electronic creature, is a project collecting under its name a specific cycle of experiments as well as recordings and performances which De Santis has been working on since relocating to Berlin. Driven by an enlightening first encounter with electromagnetism and its enormous potential as an engine for sound generation and physical automation, as GRÜN, De Santis composes electronic music in terms of electrical circuit design and creation of modular sound objects. The GRÜN Machines have taken shape through studies and experiments focusing on electromagnetism as natural source and expression of life. De Santis dedicated the project to the color green, taken as archetypal symbol of what we usually call "Nature”. Merging electricity as direct source of sound, field recordings of natural tactile noises and tonal parts (often live or recorded string instruments parts), GRÜN gives life to a chaotic sound magma that attempts to imagine sound as a living organism seen from the inside. Arrangement rules are based on a fully improvised performative approach following the organic rules of spontaneous gestural interaction with the Machines. A natural and unstable musicality is thus gradually revealed, for instance as momentary regular geometries emerging through the freeform of the living matter. At the project’s core is constant research into the creation of sound synthesis modules, recycling old electronic components, and looking toward a possible sustainability of electronic music production. GRÜN's performances and workshops have been hosted by international festivals like Berlin Atonal, CTM Siberia, STRØM, PHONO. The project's debut album "Supervegetale" has been released at the end of 2015 by Dromoscope Editions as first chapter of the Antidigital Series, a cycle of four cassette releases produced and curated by De Santis himself as a systematic start for the editorial activity of Dromoscope. Purpose-built to promote displacement of electronic arts from dominant straight club culture and to support improvisational performative approaches, Dromoscope project was founded during 2011 in Rome as a sustain for avant-garde electronic a/v languages in Italy. Taking shape as a series of namesake Sessions, during time Dromoscope has depicted an osmotic rich network of artists and supporters while gradually coming to represent the history itself of its permanent itinerant exhibition, and nowadays also a label. Since 2015 De Santis' activity has been supported by CTM' Berlin Current Initiative while beginning a collaboration with Morphine label head and electronic music producer Rabih Beaini. In this pairing, which appeared this past year at the Jazzhouse in Copenhagen and at CTM’s Siberia edition, De Santis returns to his roots as a percussionist. In the same role, within the frame of CTM's 2016 opening concert, he has taken part at Beaini's commissioned piece "For The Red Right Hand" together with Sofia Jernberg, Rully Shabara, Sam Shalabi, Liz Albee, Mazen Kerbaj, Tommaso Cappellato and Sharif Sehnaoui. 2016 sees De Santis also giving life to a new solo performance for prepared and selfmade electroacoustic drums which creates a connection between his peculiar approach to acoustic percussions and the research feed by GRÜN' experiments. The project will see its premier in Beirut, hosted by Irtijal Festival 2016.