Full Album show of April 20 2021
Album: Locked in


Artist's Biography

mLau is a musical journey by Massimo Marraccini and Maria Laura Ronzoni, longtime friends who although living in different cities felt the need to compose an album together while at a distance. With no creative limits, and without trying to please the commercial market, instead focusing on pure artistic expression without filters, rules or confines, the two songs published to date are the first of nine already produced that will see the light in the months to come.
The duo is also planning a performance that aims to be an audio-visual experience rather than a concert. A sort of immersive soundscape with the musicians accompanied by avant garde visual content. A multimedia live exhibition combined with different forms of contemporary art.

Maria Laura Ronzoni A Rome-based artist, she has spent many years performing concerts all over Europe including an extended period of ten years in Ireland where she began her musical and poetical journey as a “busker” in Temple Bar. During this time, she shared the stage with well-known performers and bands such as Aslan, Kila, Mary Stokes, Wally Page, Mark Geary, Kay McCarthy, Antonella Ruggiero, Alessandro Mannarino, Damien Rice and the legendary poet and songwriter Wally Page.
Graduated from ABRSM in Dublin and specialized in Renaissance and Baroque music, she is the winner of the “BEST LYRICS” Prize for the song “Per le Strade di Dublino” from the solo album CALLIOPE.
The album is published by HELIKONIA/Indi Records and distributed by EGEA MUSIC.
The broad scope of Maria Laura’s musical style encompasses such diverse influences as folk, rock and world music, and her passionate love for classical and Renaissance music shines through in this unique selection of songs.

Massimo Marraccini Graduated from the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia in Rome, Massimo Marraccini specializes at the Berklee School of Music in Boston Mass. He collaborates for several years with the major Italian Symphonic Orchester: the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, the RAI Symphony Orchestra of Rome and Turin, the Lazio Regional Symphony Orchestra, Roma Sinfonietta; from 1998 to 2007 he held the position of first percussionist in the R.T.E. Dublin Concert Orchestra and plays with the likes of Corrs, Sir. Gorge Martin, David Gray, Ronan Keating, Westlife, Boyzone. Back in Italy in 2008, he resumed his live activity as a drummer and in 2015 he opened the SoundSideStudio, where he still works today.


About the Album

The musical duo returns to the digital stores one year after the publication of the first single No One Around, an artistic expression that collected the immediate impressions of what would turn into an epochal crisis, and a few months after the release of A Queen With No Head, the second single accompanied by a bewitching video clip in graphic animation that has garnered widespread approval from national and international magazines and radios. Five pieces proposed, of which four originals plus a tribute to one of the great masters of the musical-literary tradition of our times who most influenced the writing of mLau's lyrics: Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, elegant, minimal and highly personal electro-folk interpretation of one of Bob Dylan's poetic masterpieces.

The collection is opened by Pinstripe Suit, a piece inspired by a real news story in which the unlikely is intertwined with the cynical cruelty of some aspects of the justice system often hidden from public opinion. It is the story of a young prisoner guilty of a minor crime but who, on the advice of a cellmate, in order to avoid the sentence, decides to fake madness and the diagnosis will lead him to spend about twenty years in a high security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, falling victim to unlikely but relentless and irreversible medical diagnoses. In an imaginary dialogue between the protagonist of the story and the author of the song, the setting takes on a hellish atmosphere while the calm, the depth of judgment and the subtle irony of the fascinating demon reveal the essence and destiny of a fallen angel. Blue Boy - Babylon Girl, a song with evocatively erotic and decadent hues, is the story of a tormented, convulsive love, destined to touch the purity of feelings only when the sacrifice of innocence marks the poetic pair of truth and beauty.

To close the circle, the two previously mentioned songs A Queen With No Head and No One Around. The voice, lyrics and melodies of Maria Laura Ronzoni, teaming up with Massimo Marraccini's rhythmic and harmonic textures, tell of a sound, compositional, musical and literary research of undoubted artistic and cultural value, an attempt to find in beauty a creative response to the profound sense of restlessness, frustration and claustrophobic isolation, a way out of the tangle of an existential condition that sees us human beings, fragile and astonished witnesses of a surreal reality in which we find ourselves alone but inexorably linked to each other and locked up, precisely locked in.