Audiopile Review: Bellofatto & Gentile is a newly minted duo made up of Dan Gentile and Jesse Edwards, the latter of whom had an excellent cassette on Pacific Rhythm last year under his C-Thru guise. That cassette was in heavy rotation here in the Audiopile office, and some further digging into Edwards’ many other pursuits brought up this album released just a few months after that tape. With 90s Italian house as a starting point for their new venture, the duo bring that lush, optimistic vibe to this rich album of finely tuned downtempo. Airy new age synth tones cushion the tropical breakbeats and dreamy melodies that, propelling this beyond a mere sedative balm. This has groove! When you’ve got two legends like John Beltran, who provides some of the mixing, and Prins Thomas serving it up on his Horizontal Mambo label, you know you’re in for a treat. This one’s for the day dreamers.

“Night Swim” is the debut LP from Bellofatto & Gentile, a collaboration that was founded on the soccer fields of Austin, Texas during the spring of 2019. The duo of Giovanni Bellofatto (an alias of Jesse Edwards) & Dan Gentile initially started exploring the melodies and textures of Italian dream house, but those experiments soon evolved to include modular synthesizers, breakbeats, and left-field samples.

Bellofatto’s work dates back to the 90’s and has credits on albums by Jessica Bailiff (Kranky), Odd Nosdam (Anticon), and His Name Is Alive. In the early 00’s, he pioneered acoustic / electronic territories with his psychedelic project Red Morning Chorus. His forthcoming solo LP “The Otherworld” is due for release on Vancouver’s Pacific Rhythm under the moniker C Thru. With 20 years of DJing under his belt, Gentile released his first house music productions as Time Zones in 2019 on Mystery Zone Records, with subsequent singles on Bay Area Disco and Moiss Music. He now lives in San Francisco, where he works as a journalist and creates visual art using a modular video synthesizer.

The legend John Beltran provides mixing treatments on half of “Night Swim” that will be released on Prins Thomas’s balearic imprint Horisontal Mambo in 2023.
massage by
Prins Thomas.