Fredo Viola - The Sad Song
“When people ask, I usually say Beach Boys meets Sigur Ros,” says Fredo Viola of his work, for reasons which become obvious from a cursory listen. Atop an otherworldly musical landscape floats a ghostly choir of wonderfully orchestrated harmonies, all created solely with Fredo’s voice, a beautiful instrument in itself which shares some of the resonance of Antony Hegarty’s neckhair-seeking delivery.
London-born, New York and Los Angeles-raised, Viola sang professionally as a boy soprano as a teenager in the celebrated Bob Mitchell Boys Choir in LA, before heading off to study film-making. His music is indebted to the classical works of Bartok. Stravinsky and Shostakovich as it is to other influences like Kate Bush, Harry Nilsson and the sparse electronica of Boards Of Canada.
The composition process begins as a vocal improvisation that is built into a complex choral tapestry, then the instruments added later but the finished material often remaining enigmatically wordless. His debut album The Turn is released on April 16 and features today’s track of the day The Sad Song which first emerged last year to breathless praise and is a perfect introduction to his fascinating layered creations, pitched somewhere between barber’s shop and monastic chanting with a nod to A-Ha’s Morten Harket (yes, really) over a skeletal electronic framework.
[Watch a video to The Sad Song here]
Not to be confused, of course, with Freddo Frog.
11:56 AM | 03/03/2009
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