Alessandra
Novaga
Alessandra Novaga is a Milan based guitarist with a solid classical training completed at the Musikhochschule in Basel. After many years spent exclusively in the classical field, her artistic course made a turning point that led her to explore and attend only the territories of experimentation, composition and improvisation, thus redesigning her relationship with sound and performance.
Her music has been recorded on Die Schachtel, Blume Editions, Setola di Maiale, Coherent States, and other labels.
She has performed with Loren Connors, Stefano Pilia, Elliott Sharp, Nicola Ratti, Massimo Falascone, Patrizia Oliva, and others.
She started to work with an array of composers and artists such Paula Matthusen, Francesco Gagliardi, Sandro Mussida, and Travis Just, among the others, who wrote the scores for her first solo electric guitar album La Chambre Des Jeux Sonores, released in 2014 on the Italian avant-garde record label Setola di Maiale.
In 2016, Alessandra Novaga released her second solo album, Movimenti Lunari published by Blume, as an investigation of her resonantly spacious guitar playing approach, aiming at deconstructing the instrument's unique properties. The record is a meditation on the relentlessness of the natural forces, memory, technology, movement and stillness.
Novaga’s third solo album Fassbinder Wunderkammer was released in 2017 as tribute to R.W. Fassbinder and his cinema. The record includes arrangements and themes written by Peer Raben, and sets a sonic journey through the many identities Fassbinder was able to embody with his unique voice.
Her recent solo album, I Should Have Been a Gardener, was released this year on the Italian sound-art/avant-garde label Die Schachtel, as an expansive meditation on the English filmmaker Derek Jarman’s life and works.
As a composer for theatre shows, Alessandra Novaga scored and played on stage for the actress/directror Elena Russo Arman, Teatro dell’Elfo, for the Milan based group Phoebe Zeitgeist and for Elio De Capitani.
She performed in Europe and in the United States at festivals such as Donaueschinger Musiktage (DE), Himera Festivaali (FN), Angelica (IT), and at Cafè OTO (London) and ISSUE Project Room (New York), among others.