Barnacles, Vonneumann

Matteo Uggeri is an Italian visual designer and composer from Milan. He invests himself in sound poetry of everyday life, organized around a vast array of personal field recordings, plunderphonia and melodic compositions meticulously arranged in a story-telling way. He’s part of the duo Starlight Assembly along with Dominic Appleton and he plays in Sparkle in Grey, Open to the Sea and The Last Five Minutes. Recently, he has released an album in collaboration with Nigel Ayers, from Solstice to Equinox, as Nocturnal Emissions & Barnacles, followed up by a live presentation of the album in Vienna. Vonneumann is an experimental/post-rock band from Rome, Italy, established in 1999. The band is named after mathematician Johann von Neumann. Vonneumann pursues free-form compositions defying typical song-writing schemes through a complex mixture of radical improvisation and written riffs, with the aid of extreme forms of irony (often bordering with pure disinformation) and through stubborn electronics and massive doses of processing, both in real-time and in post-production.

Vonneumann’s last album Johnniac was named among the best Italian post-rock albums of 2023. Vonneumann and Barnacles now team up to release the album The Gravedigger Kid. The genesis of this concept goes back to 2016, when Fabio Ricci (bass guitar, trumpet and drums for Vonneumann) reached out to Matteo Uggeri to propose a collaboration. This sparked an incredible mind journey that ultimately led to the development of a concept album based on the admiration dead musicians get from their followers and the almost necrophiliac way their legacy is often exploited.