Live at Heart is one of Scandinavia’s biggest showcase festivals and industry conferences. They are showcasing the stars of tomorrow and bringing creative professionals together to inspire, learn and create. During Live at Heart, hundreds of artists, filmmakers, industry delegates and thousands of Live at Heart fans come together in the heart of Örebro. They come from different backgrounds, cultures and industries.
Live at Heart is taking place in Örebro from the 4th of the 7th of September, here are the Italian artists playing at the festival: JoyCut, Damien McFly, Old Fashioned Lover Boy, Ilaria Graziano & Francesco Forni.
Damien McFly
Hailing from Padova, Italy, Damien Mcfly is the moniker behind Damiano Ferrari, a driven, passionate and charismatic singer-songwriter who bridges the gaps between old and new. Captivating audiences with his raw vocals, the timeless vibes of folk and modern sounds of indie his music has taken him to more than 15 different countries playing over 500 shows.
October 2015 saw the release of Damien ‘s first original album entitled “Parallel Mirrors”. This earned him festival appearances at SXSW, Canadian Music Week (covered by Rolling Stone Italy), BBC Carfest, International Richmond Film Festival and Home Festival as well as opening supports for Gill Landry (ex Old Crow Medicine Show) and Justin Nozuka.
With Damien’s YouTube channel having 30,000 subscribers and over 6 million views his video of “New Start” was a feature on MTV New Generation Italy.
Over the last 5 year’s Damien has collected accolades such as the Honourable mention in the International songwriting Competition and unsigned only for his first single I can’t reply and most recently for his latest release Leap. In 2018 Damien reached the final of the John Lennon songwriting competition winning the Grand Prize in the Folk category for his song “Mesmerised”.
Old Fashioned Lover Boy
“Veering from jazz to folk, pop to lo-fi abstraction, his work has gradually found an audience online.” Clash Mag
With the release of his debut album, ‘ Our Life Will Be Made of Simple Things’, he gained the attention of fans abroad in the UK and in the USA as the lead single ‘Oh My Love’ was spreading across the world. Old Fashioned Lover Boy has since shifted his acoustic guitar-dominated sound to focus more on piano-driven melodies complemented by soul and RnB elements. Drawing from a vast array of soul and folk influences from eclectic acts like Blood Orange, Frank Ocean, Daniel Caesar, Local Natives, and Dirty Projectors, Old Fashioned Lover Boy ’s sound can be compared to acts like Bon Iver, Tom Odell, Ryan Adams and James Morrison. He manages to perfectly blend jazz, soul, folk and funk as he guides each genre in a harmonious dance, allowing each element the spotlight it deserves, without dominating over the other parts that make up his layered soundscape. The lead single from Old Fashioned Lover Boy ’s upcoming album, ‘I Pray’, was produced by previous collaborator Marco Giudici ( Any Other, Leude, Generic Animal ) and composed buy Panzeri himself.
‘I Pray’ is a jazz-infused, soulful piano-lead song. Each tender percussion hit, subtle guitar lick, and piano chord work together to enhance Old Fashioned Lover Boy ’s entrancing voice, as he croons across this smooth and luxurious track. ‘I Pray’ tackles themes of self-care and coming to terms with your own happiness, before being able to open up to a potential romantic partner.
JoyCut
JOYCUT makes music for the future, weaving its sound from a mass of electronics and two drum kits. Orchestral breathings, cinematic saturations, tribal drumming and industrial percussion.The Bologna-based band design atmospheric layers of sound with a dark edge, a massive beat, a twitching melancholy and inventiveness that makes them hypnotic in their power and imagination. The band’s last album, PiecesOfUsWereLeftOnTheGround took the band to new heights, evidenced by the
album’s continued success, with a never-ending tour of over 300 dates across North America, Asia and Europe.
With the digital mantra #JoyCutNeverStops the band touched more than 60 countries, culminating in a Top 5 European Talent Exchange Programme [ETEP] position. Following a successful TEDx performance in Verona and inspired by their recent vivid travels to the East, JOYCUT played a sold-out Venice Biennale show debuting their new six-acts “Opera” K O M O R E B I, a soundtrack tribute to Japan: a combination of their dramatic music with visual art chapters that created a
world to get lost in. Komorebi is the “distinctive effect of sunlight as it filters through the thin gossamer leaves of trees”. Nature is at the heart of their philosophy. Commitment to environmental issues has led JOYCUT to participate in many sustainability green projects and campaigns.
JOYCUT have been personally invited by Robert Smith to his Meltdown Festival at Southbank Centre in London in 2018. JOYCUT also shared the main stage at INmusic Festival with The Cure in 2019. JOYCUT will be honoured to perform for the very first time in Sweden, bringing all the shades of their dreamscapes of blue-tinged beauty, in a show that will reveal unpublished “tracks”.
Ilaria Graziano & Francesco Forni
Ilaria Graziano & Francesco Forni propose a show made of folk, blues and dolce vita.
An amazing duo singing in English, French, Spanish and surely, their own native language, Italian. Their performance is a fascinating journey, across Mexico and Texas, mixing easily blues, folk, Argentinian Tango and Neapolitan songs. They performed all around Europe and in the United States. The sound they give life to is full of different influences, including folk music and blues. They like to connect the tracks they compose with traditional folk, coming from the South of Italy or Eastern Europe as well as from the American music treasures. Original tracks from Francesco’s and Ilaria’s solo albums as well as from her well-known movies soundtracks are among their repertoire.
Francesco’s and Ilaria’s performance together is a very interesting mix of languages, from Italian to English as well as Southern Italy’s dialect, with some influence from Eastern Europe too. The result is a continuous game and role exchange between the soft, warm and fascinating sound of Francesco’s guitar who sometimes seems to be close to catching fire and the evocative voice of Ilaria which could as well be coming from another time and space, hypnotic as it is.