M+A

Italian complete press reviews - Foolica

“Ihr bestens aufgelegtes Elektro-Album verbreitet gute Laune ohne Ende, ist versehen mit einer ganzen Reihr gelungener Melodiebögen inklusiver mega-einprägsamer Hooklines.” - Sound and Image

“These Days is a thick album, despite of its genesis in-motion” - Cheap Sound

“Dare we suggest that ‘B Song’ sounds a little Beck-y? Yes, we dare. It’s sort of retro, but definitely with a here-and-now undercurrent – a track to bop to, but not without engaging one’s brain. We’re hearing flashes of Phoenix in there, too.” - Clash Music

“Le duo M+A libère l’émotion et transcende la pop. Une véritable porte ouverte sur l’élégance musicale que les Italiens n’ont de cesse de révéler.” - Indie Music

“…it’s hard to imagine a world without it!” - Euradio Nantes

“Après Things.Yes, à l’électronique lumineuse, M+A revient avec un album plus pop et tout aussi ensoleillé. De quoi crier, E Viva Italia!” - Benzine Mag

“Things.Yes was an inventive and spirited exploration of an organic, heartfelt variety of genre-hopping electro-acoustic pop that promised many good things to come from the young artists. But, perhaps nothing could’ve prepared us for These Days.” - Contact Music

M+A, ‘These Days’ (Monotreme Records)

Monotreme Records has recently celebrated 10 years of independent, excellent, leftfield releases. An Italian duo, M+A’s second album is a slice of electronic lounge pop beaming with La Dolce Vita. At first this could be construed as achingly hip, but inside its Brooklyn indie-dance wrapping is a series of heartfelt, affecting pop songs. Alessandro Degli Angioli is not only a writer and performer in the duo but also designed the band’s album artwork and merchandise. We posed him some questions on his featured kaleidoscope of colour. - Drowned in Sound

M+A might not be a household name but the Italian duo, Michele Ducci and Alessandro Degli Angioli, have just produced one of the smartest and smoothest pop records of 2013. - The Line of Best Fit

New Band of the Week: M+A (No 10)
By Paul Lester

The lineup: Michele Ducci (vocals, instruments) and Alessandro Degli Angioli (instruments).
The background: So Italy need to win tonight. We have to will them to win. We need to only eat Italian food all day, chant Italian phrases, watch Italian movies, and only listen to Italian bands. Luckily, we have one for you, and they are good enough, and they have enough good music, to last until the match. If you make their music the sole soundtrack of your Friday, it will have been a good day. New Band of the Week? New Band of the Month, maybe even year. Up there, anyway. Who says? We say.

But not just us. A team of experts including Chris Salmon from the actual Guardian, Huw Stephens from Radio 1, a representative from The Great Escape Festival and Michael and Emily Eavis deemed them worthy of winning this year's Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Competition, out of thousands of entrants, ahead of the excellent likes of Hero-Fisher, Only Girl, Furs, the Black Tambourines, Pandr Eyez and Izzy Bizu. This means they have secured a slot on one of the main stages at this year's festival, and a £5,000 PRS for Music Foundation Talent Development prize, "to help take their songwriting and performing to the next level" (or buy sweets with). It also nudged us into making them New Band of the Week. Because they're Italian, yes. But also because they're great.


They're an electro-pop duo, but they don't do cold modernist sample-heavy electronica (not that we have a problem with cold modernist sample-heavy electronica, far from it). No, they do the Daft Punk thing (and the thing of every band, ever, until roughly 1998) of playing everything on their record on instruments, some of which happen to be keyboards that plug in. It's pop-disco, really, or chillwave disco, with hints of all our - and maybe your - favourites from New Order circa Perfect Disco to Washed Out circa Belong. It's wonderfully wan but warm, upbeat yet sad, melodic but melancholic dance music, with plenty of piano (an anagram, pointedly, of "o, pain"), although it's not, we don't think, despite their country of origin and chosen genus, Italo disco. Wasn't the ghastly Ride On Time by Black Box Italo disco? Beats us. We just write cover stories on the subject and interview its prime movers. We are, frankly, stumped by its genealogy. No matter. When, the new single by M+A, is an awesome slice of propulsively poignant summery yearning, with a memorable synth hook that does an impression of pizzicato strings, or vice versa. Even the terrible rap halfway through doesn't spoil it. You don't mind the terrible rap. The terrible rap works. There are two albums' worth of this stuff to investigate - and by investigate we mean "type M+A into Spotify and press search" - and it's nearly all of this quality. They even manage to turn M.I.A.'s Paper Planes into a heartbreaking elegy for lost youth, which - and in this instance we do know what we're talking about because we checked first with Rap Genius - wasn't quite Ms Arulpragasam's original intention. In fact, according to the planet's leading lexical translator, she wrote it about tourist-murdering passport-counterfeiting thieves". So, unless Messrs M and A had, like, seriously unhappy childhoods, they're being ironic in their transmuting of it into a dolorous lament. And quite ingenious, unless we're being slow and it's just the obvious (M.I.A./M+A - geddit?). Anyway. Avanti, Italia!

The buzz: "One of the smartest pop records of the year" - The Line of Best Fit.
The truth: Listen to this music. England's survival depends on it.
Most likely to: Murder on the dancefloor.
Least likely to: Murder a tourist.
What to buy: The single When is released on 4 August by Monotreme. The album These Days is set for release on 30 September.
File next to: Phoenix, Rimar, Jensen Sportag, Breakbot.
Links: ma-official.com.
Ones to watch: Safe Barracks, Bear Mountain, Field Mouse, Alvvays, Movement. - The Guardian

from Glastonbury Festival website:

We’re very pleased to announce that the winners of last night’s Emerging Talent Competition 2014 were the wonderful M+A (pictured above) who had a packed Pilton Working Men’s Club bouncing with their ebullient electronic sounds. The duo’s prize is a slot on one of the Festival’s main stages this year, plus a £5,000 cheque towards their development from the PRS Foundation (as part of our ongoing relationship with PRS for Music).

The two runners-up on a night of extremely high quality performances were The Black Tambourines and Izzy Bizu, who both win a slot at Glastonbury 2014, as well a cheque for £2,500 each from the PRS Foundation. - M+A win 2014 Emerging Talent Competition | Glastonbury Festival

The Telegraph: M+A - New Music
by Catherine Gee

Who are they?
Dreamy electro-pop duo M+A fought off six finalists – plus approximately 6,000 other entrants – to win the coveted Glastonbury Emerging Talent award, securing them a £5,000 cheque and a slot on one of the main stages at this weekend’s festival.
How did they get here?
Italians Michele Ducci, 23, and Alessandro Degli Angioli, 26, met five years ago after mutual friends told them they should be making music together. Back then both were living in Italy, near Bologna. Since then, however, the pair have lived in different countries, as Degli Angioli moved to London, then spent two years studying in Bergen, Norway. Despite the distance, last year the pair released their debut album, These Days. “We usually just send tracks via email and we play together on Skype,” says Degli Angioli. “We spend one month a year together when we record stuff.”
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What do they sound like?
Degli Angioli describes M+A’s sound as “electronic pop music with exotic influences – there’s a Brazilian sound to it”. Both are multi-instrumentalists and share piano, guitar, bass, synths, and drum machine duties. Their sound is a faintly melancholic mix of dance, pop, hip hop and indie that brings to mind the cerebral, vibrant soundclash of Phoenix or early-Beck.
How do they feel about playing the UK's biggest festival?
“We were a bit scared,” admits Degli Angioli. “We didn’t expect to win the competition. Glastonbury will be the biggest stage we’ve ever played.”
New single When is released 4 August, and album These Days is out now on Monotreme Records. Catch them at Glastonbury on the West Holts Stage at 11.45am on Sunday, June 29. ma-official.com - The Telegraph