Masterfully enjoyable vocal phenomenon! Again just extensively quoting HUMO: 'The Flying Pickets. Aphex Twin. The Beach Boys. Autechre. Boards of Canada. Harry Nilsson. 'The Turn' by old (39!) New Yor...

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Masterfully enjoyable vocal phenomenon!

Again just extensively quoting HUMO: 'The Flying Pickets. Aphex Twin. The Beach Boys. Autechre. Boards of Canada. Harry Nilsson. 'The Turn' by old (39!) New York debutant Fredo Viola is barely definable - we hear further echo's of The Beta Band's psychedelic electro-pop ('The Original Man') and the most idyllic of Midlake ('Robinson Crusoe').'

But in the end, no reference does it justice: what Viola does with those influences, is completely unique. He combines doowop and electronica, but he does more than cheer up golden melodies (you can hear that he has sung in a church choir) with digital effects. He creates a symbiosis of two worlds.

'The Turn' is first class, a dozen songs long. There is melancholy in songs like 'The Sad Song' or 'K thru 6', but Viola never goes over the edge into pitch-black – the subtle play of light and darkness is precisely the trumph card of this record. Unbelievable how a childish sentence like 'You are my friend, if you want to come in / If you don't wanna come in, then you're not my friend' can continue to resound in your head, simply because it is accompanied by a subtle tribal beat and seems to be sung by an angel enjoying oral pleasure. Viola even sounds catchy when singing about 'HD compression'.
'The Turn' also comes with a DVD and, for a change, that's no sales trick. Before trying his luck in the music world, Viola had already built up a solid reputation as (experimental) director and multimedial artist – see too: the refreshing and childishly funny interactive site www.theturn.tv. That reputation is deserved, as is apparent in the eight films that even we (possessors of an extremely short attention span when it comes to video clips) watched, breathless. Moreover, the music on the DVD is slightly different to that on the CD, there is even a version of 'Silent Night' on it – the second only version of this Christmas carol (the first being from Sufjan Stevens) not to spontaneously cause us to dry-retch.
Meanwhile, Viola's market-value continues to rise: he has sung in a few songs for the new Massive Attack album (which, according to the latest rumours, has now been postponed until 2010). 'The Turn' is maybe not the very best album of the year but does, for the moment, have the lead for being the most original. You have to hear it to believe it. But you can also believe LES INROCKS: 'In New York, the hands-on Fredo Viola has developed the formula for bewitching songs ... male choir ... the album continues to take us to paradise ... we're sure you'll see him topping the bill in the near future.'

Support act will be Liesa Van der Aa. Brilliant this summer during the 11 July Gulden Ontsporing in Brussels. We take up the thread of our recruiting rhetoric at the time. We take up the thread of our recruiting rhetoric at the time: 'Young singer Liesa Van der Aa (° 1986), from Brussels, learned to play violin at the age of five. She followed Cabaret at Studio Herman Teirlinck and became known as violinist to Het Zesde Metaal and her band Louisa’s Daughter. Here solo with nothing more than her voice and her violin. She creates idiosyncratic compositions live, making use of loops and effects. "She intrigues from behind a number of effects pedals and with an exceptional violin sound" - Cutting Edge. Early this year she toured with Saint Amour, a performance about which De Standaard wrote: "Musician Liesa Van der Aa is the most distinctive figure on stage".