Fabio Mina

Fabio Mina began playing the flute at an early age. During his conservatory studies he started experimenting with improvisation, initially in jazz and subsequently within a musical landscape without fixed boundaries. For him, improvisation offers a way of engaging with the present moment, listening deeply to what is happening both within and around the performer as the music takes shape.

He seeks a conception of the flute free from clichés, exploring its textures and extending its possibilities through live electronics and effects, particularly delays and harmonisers.

Drawn to different musical approaches, he has studied North Indian, Japanese and Persian music. His instrumental studies include the bansuri, an Indian bamboo flute; the dizi and hulusi, Chinese wind instruments; the duduk, an Armenian double-reed instrument traditionally made from apricot wood; the fujara, a large Slovak overtone flute; the khaen, a mouth organ from Laos and Thailand; and other wind instruments.

His collaboration with Markus Stockhausen began in 2007 and has included festival appearances in Italy and Germany. Stockhausen also produced his first album, Vìreo. With percussionist Marco Zanotti and oud and plucked-string player Peppe Frana, Mina explores electroacoustic improvisation influenced by psychedelia and jazz-rock.

He is interested in creating concerts around the particular sounds of a place, establishing a relationship with the landscape and building a bridge through sound between different environments. Music becomes a means of sincere dialogue and an exchange of emotions, knowledge and experience.

To this end, he records the sounds of individual places, favouring those that are hidden or less immediately apparent. He uses conventional, stereo and contact microphones, as well as hydrophones to capture sounds beneath the surface of the water.