Drift Lab – Moonlight

From February 14, 2023 is available “MOONLIGHT” the first album by Drift Lab, a group made up of four well-known and expert Italian musicians: Manuel Montesanti – Piano & Keyboards; Matthew Mancuso – Guitars; Frederick Malaman – Bass; Daniel Chiantese – Drums.

Contents

Yamaha Sessions
Useful Information

The four, in addition to being musicians, are also experts in music technology (Yamaha endorsements) and this allowed them to develop the project completely remotely. Meaning each member of Drift Lab played and recorded from their own personal studio. The mixing was also done online and performed by the Sound Engineer Alessio Meleo.

I **Drift Lab** – from left **Manuel Montesanti** - **Matthew Mancuso** - **Frederick Malaman** - **Daniel Chiantese**

Nota: play/produce remotely. Today, thanks to emerging technology, new collaborations between musicians are increasingly taking shape, which would otherwise be difficult to achieve. Remote composing, arranging, playing and recording is now a reality. The pandemic then, with the forced isolation, gave a further and sudden acceleration to this whole process, acting as a catalyst.
Therefore, there are more and more projects/collaborations that are born and developed remotely, starting from the more amateur ones up to to those of world stars. So today, with the same manufacturing principle, it comes to life Moonlitgh by Drift Lab.
This method allows you to cancel distances, to open collaborations that for logistical problems would be difficult to achieve as well as leave the musician free to give his contribution when he wants and is more inspired, in an environment familiar to him and much more.

The Album is obviously the artistic expression of the four musicians who make up Drift Lab and who have their roots in the Jazz music, rock e fusion, passing through the classic and not disdaining the various contaminations. The songs start initially from the "pen" of M. Montesanti and then be discussed, arranged and embellished with everyone's contribution.

The birth of Drift Lab originates from a historical collaboration between Montesanti and Chiantese to which Malaman and Mancuso were later added.

View theirs individual social and dissemination activities, many of you will have already got to know and appreciate individually the four members of the band. In fact, many pages on the web talk about them. But now it is the group that plays and offers itself to the public, where everyone, expressing themselves at their best, is at the service of the others and of the music, coherent with the proposed message.

The opening track Moonlight, which also gives the album its title, is also present with a video:

The video, with the presence of the images that accompany the audio, can help better than any other word, to highlight the musical genre, the executive joints and the skill of the individual musicians who untangle themselves with pleasant ease between solos, harmonic/rhythmic intertwining and main theme. It is immediately noticeable how everyone, from their respective personal studio, plays and contributes to the drafting of the piece which, like the entire album, has a clear fusion imprint, however embellished by modern, refined and refined sounds and solutions. The other 7 pieces then follow, for a total of 8, in a succession of harmonic/rhythmic solutions and main themes.

In the second piece, entitled MURANO, M. Mancuso's guitar "sings" beautifully developing both the main theme and the variations for almost all 4,36m, beautifully “supported” by all the others.

King of Nothing instead it opens with a nice bass groove Slap by Federico Malaman, stuck perfectly with the drum of Chiantese, and then opens up with the guitar to develop the theme. From minute 2,23 there is also room for a nice bass solo.

In MIMMA instead from the minute 1,54 it is Montesanti's piano that takes over with a short solo.

Then, one by one, all the other songs follow one another, in an interesting, engaging and pleasant flow, consistent with the genre and writing of the four and which you can easily listen to on the numerous platforms.

Almost always the "instrumental song" is entrusted to the beautiful guitar of Matthew Mancuso who, also thanks to a very particular and personal technique as well as (despite his young age) a profound knowledge of the instrument and of the music, manages to communicate and involve the listener.

The beautiful rhythms of Daniel Chiantese , never trivial and although sometimes complex in execution, they are nonetheless "easy" to listen to and engaging.

Federico Malaman's bass (appreciated and well-known musician) is always precise, with a nice groove and the right amount of notes, even when they may seem like a lot, because in fact they are the ones we need and we like to hear.

The keyboards of the author/producer Manuele Montesanti often embrace all the other instruments, dictating the guidelines of the composition, the motifs, the supports, the openings, the connections between the parts, without ever exceeding and thus leaving the right space for the three project partners.

A few days after its release, the album, thanks also to the support of Yamaha which sponsored and promoted it, is available on 38 different stores in 150 countries and is already attracting considerable interest, especially in Japan, the UK, the USA and Northern Europe.

The videos of the songs linked to the album and available on youtube are: Moonlighth, Japanese Experiment e Yamaha Sessions which is the set of three videos/songs, so in MIMMA sequence; King of Nothing; My OS.

Japanese Experiment

Yamaha Sessions

Even if streaming, with its compressions and its laws, generally does not allow a purely audiophile listening, the album sounds good, thanks both to the excellent initial takes and to the work done in the mixing/mastering phase by the Sound Engineer Alessio Meleo.

Salvatore Savio Aversano