Fried Hippocampus

Matteo Ciminari is a London-based composer, guitarist, keyboardist and player of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact via two metal antennas that sense the relative position of the player’s hands. The instrument’s sound, often described as "eerie," has been used in countless film soundtracks including Bernard Herrmann's "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Ciminari weaves the unusual instrument into a soup of avant-garde jazz, film music and an iconoclastic sense of composition with influences ranging from Thelonious Monk to Frank Zappa to Igor Stravinsky. Recorded remotely during the Coronavirus lockdown by musicians in the UK and Italy and mastered by three-time Grammy winner Marc Urselli, the album title and all song titles on "Fried Hippocampus" are inspired by Ciminari’s love of food as well as the limbic system, the set of structures in the brain that deal with emotions and memory, and - in Ciminari’s words - where "all of the archetypes are recorded."