After knowing the guys from Italian AV act Frank Sent Us for more than a decade, and having played at many festivals together, often one of us supporting the other, we’d still never collaborated or actually performed together!
Italian arts festival Romaeuropa finally solved that when in December 2014 we were asked to perform Orchestra of Samples with Frank Sent Us for the closing event of the 2014 edition of the prestigious Italian art festival at world famous Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma.
Taking their name from a line of dialogue in spaghetti Western classic Once Upon a Time in the West they’d once sampled, Frank Sent Us are Mastro on guitar, Orange on bass, drummer and beat maker Frenetik Beat and binding it all together with audio/video samples is former DJ / VJ and ‘mutant artist’ (as he describes himself) Frank Sandrello (aka Alessandro Roberti). So after rehearsals during the day, we took the opportunity of recording main guitarist Mastro for the project, for later sampling.
Hailing from Rome, Frank Sent Us are a hybrid sample-fused AV rock band, a total melting pot of music and video, an explosive mash-up of guitars and video samples. With real time mixing, cut-up video is sampled and played like a musical instrument and when performing, it’s clear they’re not a band with just video behind them, but a band with video that is integral to what they do. The guys mostly play in Italy where they have a big fan base and often headlined stages.
In 2012 they released their first DVD “Watch The Sound” (Yorpikus Sound) which was created entirely with audio taken from original video filmed in Italy, Brazil and the UK. Check the guys out here and here.