Pheel Balliana
Natal
“My music is from the south of the world, it’s Latin, it’s all a bit dirty, dusty and drunk. I’m a pirate, a gypsy and a clown.”
In the world of Pheel Balliana, both the man and the music are synonymous. He captures the flavours of the tropics and the rhythms of a buccaneer, the smoky atmosphere of a clandestine meeting and a dark longing for beauty. He creates a mood in which his sophisticated version of trash meets seedy-late night romance, in a room always free from guilt or judgment. He is the joker in the pack of cards, the sly trickster with an ace up his sleeve.
Pheel Balliana’s current alter-ego of a singing clown emerges from a long line in his professional work, having lived first in Bari in southern Italy, then Rome, Paris, Rio and Natal in Brazil, where he is now primarily based. “My clown can cry glycerine tears like Pierrot, or he can be a figure of fun and slapstick humour. He can also be scary and nightmarish. But as a clown, I am always sure to wear my invisible red nose.”
Pheel was born Filippo Carlos Balliana, in Andria in Puglia. His father owned an antique shop, worked for a time behind-the-scenes in Circo Orfei, a classic Italian circus, and even ran a disco back in the 1970s. “All the vinyls from the disco-era were played as the sound- track of my childhood.”
Since then, Pheel’s career has been multi-faceted. He has worked as a wedding singer, a vocalist in discotheques from Milan to Jakarta, in cabarets in the red-light district of Paris and as a club-land recording artist. His first single was a house-music record with Joe T. Vannelli, which sold well in Russia. Other songs have been included on the official compilations for Space in Ibiza, Buddha Bar and Saint Germain des Prés Café. In 2000, Pheel opened the Zurich Energy Street Parade in front of more than 1 million people, performing on the first truck ahead of 40 floats, the master-of-ceremonies welcoming the crowd to the event. More recently, he has worked with the dandy deejays Bart & Baker in Paris on four different records, and collaborated on remixes by Nicola Conte, the electro- jazz genius from Bari. Pheel has also been immortalized as the multi-lingual protagonist in a video installation projected onto satellite dishes by the unconventional Spanish artist Francesca Marti’.
Pheel Balliana’s tracks
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