Band Members Chris Belsito - lead vocals, guitars Ed Young - drums and percusion Craig West - lead guitar Jay Case - lead guitar Lindsay Pugh - bass guitar Larry Borek - keyboards, piano George Ravlich - bass and sound advice Chris Belsito loves music. No, he really loves music. Belsito is an avid music collector and listener. He has been a music journalist. He wanted to support indie artists he liked so much that he founded an independent record label. On top of all that, he is an established recording artist and prolific songwriter. As a performer, Belsito has played his music across the Americas, from Montreal to Vancouver, Memphis to Buenos Aires. He has showed up at cafes, clubs, lounges, theatres, and festivals, as well as being a formidable opening act on the larger stage with many of his musical heroes. His music has appeared in ad campaigns and indie films, played on indie radio and CBC, can be found across the web, and on CDs by other artists. Song scouts for some of Canada’s top artists have even sought him out. Releasing four full-length CDs and one E.P. of his own material, as well as a live performance DVD, Belsito has wasted no time in making sure his ventures in the music world have been well documented. In return, his music is in thousands of homes across the world. Not bad for an artist who calls a small town in Northern Ontario his home. Belsito, whose latest batch of songs are as poetic, cinematic and emotionally powerful as any he has ever written, is currently completing his latest CD. The songs are more expansive and moving than ever, sitting somewhere in between Norah Jones and Interpol, Ryan Adams and The National, Rufus Wainwright and The Decemberists. The music is at once uniquely atmospheric and immediately catchy. With more songs written than he could record himself, Belsito is also in the early stages of increasing his profile as a ‘songwriter for hire’ in the music industry - with some of those new songs being targeted for other artists. With his small record label, Murderous Butterfly Music/Murderfly Entertainment, now boasting some of Northern Ontario’s top indie artists and a new album of new material near completion, Belsito is comfortable in his musical world. How does he define personal success? For him, success is being able to perpetually translate a love of music into new opportunities that allow him to continually develop as both an artist and a musical entrepreneur. Below is the 2005 Fade Dissolve Bio Chris Belsito is the product of a number of conflicting musical generations. He takes the lyrical prowess of folkies like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, mixes them with the catchy anthemic sing-along choruses of 80's-style heavy metal, and packages them in the transcendental blanket of acoustic-based atmospherics created by artists like U2. Belsito kicked off his musical recording career in the early 1990s and was part of a wave of acoustic-based music that dominated the fringes of the mainstream radio. Sitting comfortably within the realm of bands like REM, Indigo Girls, and Blue Rodeo, Belsito was embraced by CBC Radio who bolstered his tunes by not only promoting individual tracks, but by airing specially recorded live concert broadcasts to a much wider audience. This provided a natural bridge to the folk festival circuit that was, at the time, expanding its format to include more rock-based artists. Performing in support of artists like Great Big Sea, Jann Arden, and Tom Cochrane, who at that time were at the top of their game. With a strong academic background in literature and a passion for the soundscapes, Belsito found a unique niche in creating the stirring combination of intelligent lyrics, atmosphere, and style, all rolled up in a catchy pop hook. By the mid-1990s, Belsito began to garner interest not only as a performer, but also as a songwriter. He was solicited by a number of professional songwriting scouts who wanted to pitch his material to both fast-rising artists like Celine Dion and classic mainstays like Anne Murray. One song in particular was taken from one of the sessions for possible use in a future Dion project. A few of his songs even showed up on independent movie soundtracks. After two releases with a back-up band, known as the Rainhorses (a la Crazy Horse), Belsito decided it was time to branch out on his own strictly as a solo artist and expand in new directions. He began work on what was to be his most experimental work to that date. Turbulence was a glossy, Berlin-esque piece of music that ushered in the atmospheric and strangely appealingly cold-centered core of classic albums like Bowie's Heroes. Belsito performed in support of Turbulence for the better part of two years, only to directly begin work on his follow-up CD. To fill the gap between full-length CDs, Belsito released a limited edition 4-song E.P. entitled Cameras that featured a taste of what was soon to come. Shortly after returning to his hometown from a successful Canadian summer tour in support of Cameras, Belsito discovered that a song entitled “Night Swimming” from his Turbulence CD had been picked up by a major company for a Canada-wide advertising campaign. His new full-length Fade Dissolve was released on July 24th, 2005. Fade Dissolve features songs with an even greater range and scope than in his past recordings. Belsito has incorporated jazz-tinged elements, oddly timed percussive pieces, and haunting dirge-like tracks that bring to mind a combination of the experimentation of Kate Bush, the musical touch of Sting or Peter Gabriel, delivered in a wildly cinematic style worthy of film soundtracks. Songs like “And Cinnamon” capture the exotic fragrance of distant oversea locales, “The Moon and Your Missiles” with its world music intro takes on the current state of foreign affairs as seen through a camera lense, and the cinematic “Gypsy Waves” has a musically-literal approach to gypsy meanderings. On his new release, Belsito has expanded his vocal range and developed a dynamic that jockeyed from the low guttural sounds worthy of Tom Waits to the high upper ranges of U2's Bono. Fade Dissolve also includes a free bonus DVD of a pro-shot concert from the Turbulence tour as well as some special "in the studio" bonus features -- no small feat for an independent artist. Fade Dissolve is set to usher in a new era for Belsito and promises to be the album to bring greater success. TO READ THE TURBULENCE PRESS RELEASE (DATED AUGUST 26, 2003), CLICK HERE