Orlando Ef

Orlando Ef is a singer-songwriter born in central Italy in a small fishermen town. From a very young age he showed a deep interest on melodies and rhythms by bagging on nice sounding cooking pans, crashing brand new glasses and uttering strange sounds on top of his very high pitched voice. At the age of 12 he found an old classical guitar in the mysterious and dusty attic of his grand parents, it was his first proper musical instrument.

At the age of 12 he found an old classical guitar in the mysterious and dusty attic of his grand parents, it was his first proper musical instrument.

He tried to play it to soon realize he needed a good teacher. Orlando spent years strumming his guitar along with his teacher Paolo Giordano (a now very well known and highly respected guitar player) as well as friends musicians from the same area. He took part in few local bands playing rock, folk, alternative and silly sounding music as guitar player, singer and drummer.

In 1998 Orlando felt the need to explore new territories in search of new stimulus and shortly after,at the age of 20, got english residency and decided to rent a room in a flat in north London.

At first Orlando saw London as too much of a big city but he ended up spending 8 years in town. He got employed in an Holborn pub and worked as waiter and glass washer living the clumsiest experiences of his life. Meanwhile he met Riccardo Ricci(a now very well experienced audio engineer) Einar Tonsberg (a poly instrumentalist from Iceland) and Carlo Polli (a percussionist from Weston-Super-Mare).

The 3 musicians formed a band called Lorien , recorded a demo cd within S.A.E. school of audio engineering and started spreading their music around.

Soon after Stevo Pearce (The extravagant manager of Soft Cell, The The, Depeche Mode) got caught by the demo cd and teamed up with Lorien. Orlando and his bandmates got meetings with the biggest and scariest record companies of that time such as Warner Bros, Emi, Universal, Virgin and Sony Music to whom Orlando played few songs with voice and guitar as showcases. Lorien ended up signing a record deal with Instant Karma ( a young indipendent label supported by Sony Music ) and a new journey took off for young Orlando.

The production of the album got started at Air Studios with Giles Martin (The talented producer, son of the legendary Beatles producer George Martin), carried on in studios all over London and England with people from the british music industry like Mike Hedges (Travis, U2, Cure) and Greg Jackman.

The first Lorien album titled ?Under the Waves? was out on 2002 and the band started the promotion tour with 50 dates in between U.K., Germany and Italy.

In 2003 Rob Dickins (chairman of Instant Karma) decided to go for the second album. New material got composed and recorded but it didn't go through because defined as not commercial enough.A crisis occured among the members and Lorien decided to split their destinies so Orlando went back to his roots and moved in a small italian village.

Even though he lived in an healthy and cosy area Orlando Ef needed to start everything from scratch and eventually finished to produce those ?uncommercial? songs with the help of his laptop and few friends.

?Agmena? was the title for his first solo album published and released on 2005 under his own new little label Ef Records. Orlando became a sort of musical artisan, doing everything in his own home recording studio.

Between 2005 and 2007 he has written and arranged music for his future solo album, composed a soundtrack for a small short movie, arranged music for few local artists and collaborated with Melaesse studio on few projects as well as teaching computer music software to young musicians and producers.

In 2008 Orlando Ef delivers his second solo album titled ?Me2u2me? recorded with friends and talented musicians as Simone Palmieri, Massimiliano De Leonardis, Emiliano Verrocchio, Roberto Torto, Massimo Magri, Gian Maria Melchiorre Ricci and Enrico ?Mamakiller? Cannoni to name a few.