MIZOOKSTRA is a meeting between free jazz and electronic music. It is radical improvisation with no structures at all.

MIZOOKSTRA is the two-headed project formed by producer and musician Mario Conte (currently also at work on the original music for the classic theatrical show Agamemnone by the acclaimed director Davide Livermore) and saxophonist Simone Garino (recently selected by MIDJ as one of the best young talents of Italian jazz), together since 2017 thanks to the common attraction towards the most brave and experimental music.

Led by the singles SESSION#5 and SESSION#7, their debut album Also Sprach MIZOOKSTRA (Nietzsche and Strauss are smiling, from another dimension…) is out today July 1st, 2022 on CD, musicassette and digital via Sangue Disken, with the artwork by Pazzi Design Studio and the calligraphy by Luca Barcellona.

The synthetic component is analog: no laptops. All of the sounds you are going to listen, from melodies to rhythmic patterns, are instantly created. Nothing is pre-programmed. The sounds made by the saxophones are sampled, filtered and re-elaborated in a constant improvisational flow. Therefore, every live show is unrepeatable, depending on the artists‘ mood, on the location and on the very moment of the performance. An ideal electroacoustic bridge between NYC loft jazz scene and Berghain dancefloor in Berlin.

MIZOOKSTRA derives from a word invented by Bertolt Brecht, that is „misuk“, literally „misuca“. According to Brecht, „misuk“ meant the opposite of „musik“ (bourgeoisie nineteenth-century music), with the reject of any formalism hoping for a music proposal at the same time intellectual and popular. Conte and Garino modified the spelling and added the suffix „-stra“, from orchestra: the sounds of the duo can be modified and multiplied infinitely, as if manipulated by a kind of imaginary instant orchestra.

MIZOOKSTRA is an open duo. More than anything else, it represents an intent: to open a window on the „dark side“of the music and who plays it. Without any distinction of gender or cultural origin. „MIZOOKSTRA was born from a need for communication. In our career we have made very different collaborations and we have noticed that often artists do not express what they really are. We all have a ‚dark side‘, but maybe we don’t realize it until someone or something gives us the opportunity to get it out. MIZOOKSTRA is our chance. It is the ritual that frees our black soul. This is only the beginning„.

The videos for SESSION#5 and SESSION#7 are realized by by the director and producer of documentaries Davide Tosco, as they were primitive compositions of images that, following a dreamlike narrative, shows scraps of the world we live in through apparently distant associations. One of the elements of Tosco’s research work is the recovery of archival visual materials, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s „ready-made“, that is the creation of new meanings starting from already existing but decontextualized film objects. Fragmented and inexorable cyclicality travels along unknown roads.