Porcelain Raft

Singer/songwriter/producer Mauro Remiddi combines hooky indie pop with dreamy, layered arrangements for his solo project Porcelain Raft. The first full-length release under the moniker was 2012's Strange Weekend, which landed in the Top 40 of the Billboard Heatseekers chart. A year later, Permanent Signals incorporated icier post-punk elements, while 2020's Come Rain was built out from a base of piano and classical guitar. Prior to playing with Onyee Lo in the duo Three Blind Mice and in their full five-piece band Sunny Day Sets Fire, the Italian-born Remiddi got his start composing the soundtrack for the short film La Matta dei Fiori in 1997. The next decade was spent performing in his two groups in addition to collaborating with video artist Ra Di Martino and Filthy Dukes for their 2008 album Nonsense in the Dark. The first Porcelain Raft EP, Gone Blind, arrived on Acephale in 2010. A second EP, the self-released Fountain's Head, appeared a year later, and Porcelain Raft released its debut album, Strange Weekend, on Secretly Canadian in early 2012. It reached number 33 on the Billboard Heatseekers Albums chart and was accompanied by tours of Europe with M83 and North America with Smith Westerns. Selling off equipment in order to avoid reproducing the sound of Strange Weekend, Porcelain Raft returned in 2013 with the instrumental modular-synth EP Silent Speech as well as another song-based full-length, Permanent Signal, both on Secretly Canadian. In contrast to his prior home recordings, the latter was tracked at the Antlers' studio with Darby Cicci. In 2015, the EP Half Awake kicked off a series of releases on Remiddi's own newly established Volcanic Field label. He collected a handful of rediscovered 2006 demos on the 2016 EP Pressed Flowers before delivering the project's third long-player, Microclimate, in 2017. Following a relocation from his longtime base of Los Angeles to Rome, Porcelain Raft released the more inward-looking Come Rain from COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.
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