Porcelain Raft's Mauro Remiddi Announces New Album 'Moonbird'

Living between Italy and Los Angeles, musician and composer Mauro Remiddi (AKA Porcelain Raft) has announced his first album under his real name, Moonbird will be released digitally on the 25th of November.

Moonbird is a decade in the malking, more than an album, it's the soundtrack to Remiddi's original opera of the same name, a feat not just sonically but visually as well.

"I imagined the music to be symphonic and ambitious. The story on the contrary had to be small, I wanted an apparently insignificant event of our day life to become a portal to something mysterious' says Remiddi.

Today along with the announcement, Remiddi is releasing the first track from the album titled "The Bird Song." The song is a kaleidoscope of sounds and textures with Remiddi's signature vocals.

The writing of the opera commenced more than a decade ago and has been an ongoing process of collaboration with Remiddi and other artists, both musical and visual spanning continents.

"The real progress started when I met some incredible musicians in Italy where I recorded Moonbird." Anais Drago (violin), Simone Pappalardo (live electronics & DIY instruments) and Simone Alessandrini (sax & electric guitar) "Their approach to the music was from angles I didn't even think of. It felt like a joined adventure, my initial vision became a collective one, that made the opera a living thing."

The music in Moonbird gives space to Remiddi's androgynous voice to really emerge like never before, he sings like a ghost between strings, synth and drum machines. This is a 'bedroom opera' as Remiddi likes to call it,

"In my head I could hear the songs arranged with a baroque music style, I wanted the opera's big gestures but done in a bedroom, with a DIY ethic, using what I had, which doesn't mean sacrificing clarity over a spontaneous approach'.

After the music was done Remiddi asked artist and filmmaker Ra di Martino to film the story of the opera. Di Martino asked actress and performer Silvia Calderoni to play Moonbird on screen. The short film is now showing as a video installation in Italy's Museum of Modern Art, MAMBO in Bologna and Mertz Foundation in Palermo.

The album is produced and mixed by Remiddi himself and mastered by his brother Manolo.

Watch the new music video here: