Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia

***Dust & Mirrors is the second full-length album by the trio of ANDREA BELFI (drums, percussion, electronics), DAVID GRUBBS (electric guitar, piano, voice), and STEFANO PILIA (electric guitar). It follows 2010’s Onrushing Cloud LP, which quickly sold out. If Onrushing Cloud represents a single stylistic arc in which these three first found commonality and shared musical means, Dust & Mirrors sees the trio confidently taking stabs in a number of opposed directions. It dramatically widens the terrain in the group operates. What changed? The difference comes with four years of semi-regular live shows, which have turned Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia from a studio-bound hibernation unit to an extroverted rock (or what’s left of it, or what’s beyond it) trio. Between albums, the three musicians worked together on David Grubbs’s 2013 album The Plain Where the Palace Stood, and took part in Grubbs’s and visual artist Angela Bulloch’s performance piece The Wired Salutation, which spins out variations on “Charm Offensive”—the fourteen-minute opening gambit on Dust & Mirrors. (The Wired Salutation features unnerving 3-D avatars of Belfi / Grubbs / Pilia and Bulloch, has been presented at the theater at the Pompidou Center and Berlin’s Tanz im August festival, and will hopefully be coming to a well-equipped theater near you before you know it.). From the epic, multi-part sprawl of “Charm Offensive” to Stefano Pilia’s distantly Robbie Basho-esque “The Distance, Cut,” and from the mechanized riffing of “The Headlock” to the wild improvisation “Ambassador Extraordinaire,” Dust & Mirrors sees this group exploding outwards from their more steely, contemplative beginnings. (STREET DATE - 2/18/2014)