photographer: Michele Aldeghi
“Horse Latitudes,” the fourth solo album by Italian singer-songwriter Andrea Van Cleef, is slated for release on vinyl, CD and digital formats on April 5, 2024 via the Italian label Rivertale Productions.
The new record represents a turning point in the career of the musician, divided between heavy-stoner rock with his previous bands Van Cleef Continental and Humulus, and “Americana” driven songwriting, veering toward more southern gothic atmospheres, indebted to Johnny Cash’s “American Recordings,” with in addition a distinctly European, especially British, dark touch.
“Horse Latitudes ” is a work matured and recorded in two times and two places, Texas and Italy, which reveals the great fascination and inspiration that western cinematography has meant in the artist’s formation, combined with the concept of folk music. A reflection on the meaning of existence and one’s path through imagery filled with totemic and archetypal symbolism.
The first sessions begin during Andrea Van Cleep’s Texas tour in late 2022 early 2023, at Rick Del Castillo‘s Smilin’ Castle Productions studio. A guitarist, musician and producer, Del Castillo is a collaborator with Hollywood director Robert Rodriguez on the soundtracks for “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” and “Machete,” as well as on the version of “Malagueña Salerosa” that appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol.2. Production of the record’s Texas tracks involves several local musicians, one above all the master and living guitar encyclopedia Matthew Smith, sessionman legend from Austin. In this journey made of live and full-time production, a series of songs with country, folk and blues structures inevitably sees the light of day, in which Van Cleef’s typically European approach is mixed with the real roots sound of musicians from the Austin scene, the capital of U.S. live music.
Back home, Van Cleef finalizes the work with a second session at Buca Recording Studio in Montichiari, with sound engineer Simone Piccinelli. This is where the musicians with whom the artist has been playing steadily for some time come into play, as well as the important featuring of Dana Colley, saxophonist of the late Morphine, the quintessential cult Boston band of the 1990s from which Van Cleef took inspiration for more melodic writing.
Anticipating the album, the release of the first single, “A Horse Named Cain” with the black-and -white video directed by Angelo Maffioletti, a homage to cult noir cinematography that winks at contemporary Nordic production. Prescient shamanic visions alternate with snippets of shots among evocative snowy forests where we find Van Cleef with his black horse in front of his white female alter ego.
Born at the foot of the Italian mountains of Vallecamonica, Andrea Van Cleef moved, after his university studies in languages, to Brescia, where he still lives and produces his music. Although he has performed in several European and national stages in recent years, Van Cleef says that it is in the Brescia territories that he makes his “home.” Guitarist and enthusiast of stringed instruments in general, voice with an intense and recognizable timbre, Andrea Van Cleef composes, sings and plays his own songs, for some time producing for other artists as well.
In 2012 the first solo album, “Sundog” is the ultimate revelation of his expressive and compositional skills with an international scope. He sings and writes exclusively in English, but with the creative and visionary Italian approach, as well as the pragmatism, also from a sonic point of view, of his Valleys. And it is this unique and personal style of the self-produced “Sundog” that has garnered interest among insiders and fans of the genre, so much so that it has become a mini-cult album and earned several reissues, following collaboration with the Rivertale Productions label. The most relevant and inescapable part of Van Cleef’s musical activity is undoubtedly his live performance. Not only “Sundog” was presented in tour through Italy, Switzerland and Germany, but the live shows intensified at a very fast pace, about 90-100 concerts annually, with the subsequent albums “Tropic Of Nowhere” (2018, Rivertale Productions) and ”Safari Station” (co-written with blues- folk Diego Deadman Potron, 2021, Rivertale productions/ Timezone) and the EP “135” (2020, Rivertale Productions). Van Cleef took part in several international stoner-doom rock festivals – among the albums with Humulus “RHINO” (2017, Kozmik Artifactz) and “The Deep” (2020, Kozmik Artifactz) – and several openings at blues-rock concerts, including Ben Harper and opening solo at The White Buffalo’s sold-out Italian show at Alcatraz in Milan. From solo, acoustic duo, to more structured and complex ensembles, Van Cleef’s shows know how to engage and capture attention of the audience.
