SAYRI Club night at Macao in Milan, 2020 (photo: courtesy of Sonia Garcia; additional design by Marina Benetti).

Amplifying Sonic Resistances Across Abya Yala

Short Essay

Milan-based activist, radio DJ, and journalist Sonia Garcia sheds light on the cultural and musical background of her community-healing project (and radio show) SAYRI, which she founded just before the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off. In the face of a growing interest in the west for what is usually referred to as «Latin Music», SAYRI offers a politicized space for queer latinx celebration in the context of Italian clubbing.1

In a year when COVID-19 has accelerated the deadly effects of capitalism, sharpening inequalities and tensions between the oppressor and the oppressed, the economical and political survival of the club and nightlife scene is far from being perceived as a priority. Under a global pandemic, it feels very privileged to fantasize about the possible futures for club culture and its related music industry, especially in a first world context, and yet imagination is key when it comes to resistance.

Europe Is Not My Center

Some questions arise, though. How can music still make sense in a scenario where the coronavirus radically incremented marginalized communities’ states of economic, social, racial, and gendered fear and outrage? How is the «club» going to save us – if it ever did – when its industry’s survival relies on the geopolitical power of the few who can afford to reimagine it?

«Europe is not my centre», pointed out Senegalese film director and writer Ousmane Sembène, in a 1998 interview with Oliver Barlet, when asked about the success of his movies in the global north (Barlet 2007). This might not be the answer, but it upholds the mindset that led me to the creation of SAYRI.

The idea behind SAYRI came long before COVID-19, when the need for a politicized space for queer latinx celebration in the Italian club context did not feel unrealistic yet. SAYRI is a cultural platform and event format for femmes/queer folks of the Abya Yala diaspora, where it is possible to imagine and build together anti-hegemonic futurabilities through arts and music. In the form of clubnight, radio show, online/offline space for queer latinxs to heal and thrive, SAYRI explores through sound and music the intersections between belonging, memory, and liberation, starting from – but not confined to – the Italian territory.

Italian Latinxs

Despite how big the community is, Italy has absolutely no latinx representation in arts and music – or pretty much anywhere. What is perceived as «latino», here and in all the global north, is a direct consequence of colonialism and its current structure of power, coloniality. «Latinidad» is a colonial fiction that thrilled us into thinking of ourselves, of our bodies and identities, as products of mestizaje. The diluted narration of «latino» as a racial and cultural identity, has led to a systemic invisibilization of Indigenous and Black communities, in our territories as well as in the diaspora. Since geography matters, let us go back to the first world’s art and music industries. «Latino» seems to have become a very fashionable trend, both in the mainstream and underground economies. The club scene is no exception.

Between 2017 and 2020, the club/experimental music scene in Italy saw the development of two interesting phenomena. First, a growing interest in afro/Caribbean/latinx-influenced sounds and aesthetics. Lots of «global music» club projects saw the light in those years, as well as the popularization of terms like «global bass», «world music», or even just «latin-oriented» club music. In 2019, it was particularly disheartening to see the same promoters and scene-adjacents capitalizing off our music, staying completely quiet during the months of insurrections against corrupt governments and police brutality, throughout the whole South American continent (Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia). Once again, the north white washing/gentrifying music and cultural productions from the South, gatekeeping them for white european consumption, came as a reiteration of its well-known colonial power.

Secondly, it was impossible not to notice the cosmetic use of «latinx decolonial» narratives adopted for woke-washing, definitely not inclusive spaces and club nights. Plenty of political initiatives in the club scene performed the «inclusivity» and «pro-diversity» cards, while still upholding inherently oppressive hierarchies in their decision-making composition. SAYRI was conceived between 2018 and 2019 as a response to these neocolonial directionalities, channeling the need to overcome the «latinx» stereotype in Italian club consciousness from within our own communities.

Reclaiming the Term

Reclaiming «latinx» means considering it as a predominantly political, sensitive, and affective dimension that transcends the corporeal one, most of the time impossible to grasp or be seen. It is not a search for western visibility – being «visible» won’t save us – but rather a tension towards horizons of abolition and intergenerational co-liberation.

As an Andean descendant, I found huge inspiration in sudaca artists like Elysia Chuquimia Crampton, and more recently Kornea (Peru), DJ Sentimiento (Peru), Mala Fama (Ecuador), NTFL (Ecuador). Their work honors Quechua and Aymara survival, queer ancestralities, and non-anthropocentric cosmogonies through sound experimentation, in and beyond the club sphere. SAYRI aims to amplify Indigenous and Black futurisms from Abya Yala in all their artistic and sonic trajectories: From the Indigenous Andean legacy rearranged in a hard-style, club perspective, to heavily percussive rhythms combined with regional genres, to perreo, cumbia, and more jarcor sudaca. SAYRI cherishes Black, marron, and queer sounds of Abya Yala experimental scene, and consolidates them as tools of resistance.

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With DJs and producers Loka (Cuba/U.S.), Slim Soledad (Brazil), La Niña Jacarandá (Chile/Venezuela) in the lineup, SAYRI was launched in Milan in February 2020 as a club night. It was the last official party I have been to before the pandemic. The sense of intimacy and reciprocity when our experiences as latinx femmes of color came together, was the most powerful and emotional moment I got to experience in 2020. As a radio show on Milan’s Radio Raheem, SAYRI has hosted four guest mixes: Loka with Slim Soledad, DJ Sentimiento, Driado (Colombia/Argentina), k1000o. Driado’s mix was aired on the 12th of October 2020, the Indigenous Resistance Day, and is an «historiography or sonic history that ‹remythicizes› certain notions about this peculiar date of October 12th», as Driado has described it. Back in April, during lockdown, SAYRI appeared on the online festival Avantgardening in conversation with collective Rete Donne Migranti e Figlie from Rome, to talk about the pandemic from an anticolonial perspective.

Healing the Community

I do not believe in the «safe space» narrative. Systems of oppression are way too internalized and can be reproduced within marginalized communities on a daily basis. What we can do is protect and heal each other, in the hostile environments we happen to navigate. In Quechua cosmogony, the space-time notion is non-linear. We walk with the past in front of us, since we know it, while the future is behind our back, unknown. Just like space-time, the process of healing is everything but linear. Asserting our existence as queer latinx femmes of color in the white cishet Italian club scene, is already a political stance. Thriving in it comes next.

1. Note of the editor: All non-capitalized adjectives and nouns (including but not limited to European, White, Western) reflect the author’s choice.

List of References

Barlet, Olivier. 2007. «Interview with Ousmane Sembène». Africultures. August 22. Accessed December 5, 2020. (http://africultures.com/interview-with-ousmane-sembene-by-olivier-barlet-6843/).

This article is part of Norient’s publication «Sonic Traces: From Italy», curated by Francesco Fusaro and funded by Italia Music Export, with the kind support of Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Londra and the Festival of Italian Literature in London.

Biography

Sonia Garcia, Peruvian born in Italy, is a DJ and contributor for several magazines. Her musical research pays homage to her Latin heritage through diasporic sounds: from the Andes to the Caribbean, celebrating the non-Western nature of the sounds that feed western club music.

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Published on April 22, 2021

Last updated on April 09, 2024

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Still from a video shot during a performance of tecnopizzica at a carnival party at Università di Lecce in 1998 (Piero Fumarola’s personal archive; image courtesy of Giovanna Martelloni and Ernesto Fumarola; additional design by Marina Benetti).

Turbo Sud: South Italian Traditional Rhythms and Their Encounters with Electronic Music

Essay

by Agostino Quaranta

Taking cues from his interdisciplinary and research-based project Turbo Sud, visual artist and music producer Agostino Quaranta unearths the almost forgotten memories of electronic experiments made with pizzica pizzica, in the Southeast of Italy. In doing so, he questions the place of traditional folk music from the South of Italy within the current cultural landscape of the Peninsula, and opens up a place for debate on the possibilities of its modern re-enactments.

What is it really all about when we discuss the rhythmic and sonic history of South Italy? And what about its electronic counterpart? The music tradition of South Italy usually refers to dances and sound styles categorized under the umbrella of Tarantella. Nowadays mostly associated with folklore or revival enactments, these regional repertoires of rhythmic and melodic patterns only sporadically overlapped with the realm of electronic music. The micro-history of experiments is therefore devoid of much documentation and is often restricted to a number of very few and isolated songs which may be forgotten or slighted even by the people who produced them. According to my personal experience, there is only one historical instance of this musical overlap: the experiments informally coined tecnopizzica, techno-pizzica, or elettro-pizzica.

The Forgotten Story of Tecnopizzica

These experiments appeared between the 1990s and early 2000s in Salento, in a period when the rise of the Folk renaissance was accompanied by the spread of groups producing techno, hip hop, reggae, drum and bass, jungle, and dub music. Some of the aforementioned sounds were likely sung in dialect, creating circumstances where they could co-exist with folk performances, sometimes influencing each other, or even being blended together. Two main references of this puzzling climate were the French anthropologist Georges Lapassade and the Apulian sociologist Piero Fumarola. They researched and actively worked together for several years in bridging possible connections between the local rise of dancehall, club culture, raves, the recreational use of drugs, and the proximity of these themes to the rural traditions of Tarantism. Somehow they likely were even the ones who orchestrated the whole foundation of tecnopizzica.1

One of the earliest and most interesting experiments with the use of traditional rhythms is a rare track titled «Transpizzica» (1995) by Pierpaolo De Giorgi e i Tamburellisti di Torre Paduli and arranged by Gino Ingrosso. The song (unfortunately it is not online) is a milestone, combining local drumming with a celestial synth pad reminiscent of the Tangerine Dream era.2 Just a few years later, in 1998, the album Elettrocontaminazioni Meridiane by Cesare Dell’Anna, Daniele Durante, and Andrea Sammartino was released thanks to the contribution of the cornerstone of Salento’s rural music, Uccio Aloisi, and the high-sounding name of the contemporary revival scene, Antonio Castrignanò. This is interesting to bear in mind since the mixture of technological and traditional elements was not that well-received by the Salento mainstream audience of folk music, as I have noticed talking both with fans and artists.3 Another band that sometimes embraced the technological conversation around pizzica’s rhythmic heritage is Nidi D’Arac, a group founded in Rome in 1995 by the musician Alessandro Coppola. «Nella Rete» (2001) is definitely the most glaring example of a cyberpunk pizzica pizzica made by the group.

Intellectual Utopia or Isolated Events?

Between 1997 and 1998, experiments by different artists, including the internationally renowned group Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, were performed live in squatted social centers around Italy. Other public demonstrations were made on some occasions by the Reggae collective Sud Sound System, singing in dialect side by side with some tambourine players. Otherwise, in 1999 a live version of tecnopizzica was even broadcast on the Italian commercial pay TV channel, TELE+. Following this timeline of now-forgotten events, the last live performance of tecnopizzica I could trace was organized in Bari at Jimmy’z club, in 2002, in collaboration with Red Bull.

The main themes of that night, as reported on the flyer, were music performances ranging «from the tambourine to computers, from pizzica to dub» by Mascarimirì, Alpha Bass, DJ Bellezza, and others. The event was lined up from a collaboration consolidated by Mascarimirì with Alpha Bass for the release of the album Taranta Trance in 2000; the album contains an awesome track titled «Trancedelic», which is probably one of my favorite tracks ever made within this context. The third guest of that gig, Dj Bellezza, is a deejay and music producer who produced two very beautiful unreleased experiments with tecnopizzica in 2003.4 In parallel with his music production, Bellezza has been busying himself for the past eight years with the construction of two DIY MIDI-triggered frame-drum tambourines.

Despite the presence of various examples of great electronic music tracks sampling the frame drums of pizzica pizzica, the majority of the musicians who made them never threw themselves headlong into these experimentations in a systematic way. Consequently, the name tecnopizzica and the concept of these experiments is still unknown even in Salento, the area where this sound should theoretically belong. But why? This is probably due to the absence of platforms, such as club nights or record labels fully invested in introducing a club music and technology-oriented narrative within the discourse of pizzica salentina. However, I believe that the reason can also be found in the academic discourses around so-called «neo-tarantism» prompted by Fumarola, Lapassade, and other intellectuals.

Rare flyer from 2002 of a gig organised in Bari at the Jimmy’z Club. The event hosted Mascarimiri, Alpha Bass, and Dj Bellezza, who showcased their music projects mixing Salento’s folk music with different club sounds (photo: author’s personal archive).

There are indeed many questions about this topic that are not easily answerable. For instance, despite the popularity of the revival, was the 1990s youth of Salento still maintaining a spontaneous and vivid link with the rural musical traditions and rites famously documented by Ernesto De Martino and Alan Lomax? If not, was the revival in Puglia heavily driven both by the new age trends and the intellectual and anthropological re-considerations of the phenomena? And what about tecnopizzica? Will it ever be revived? Or will it just remain an eccentric academic utopia and a quickly left-behind chapter of folk music from the Southeast of Italy?

Politics of the Folk Revival

«Will taranta ever reincarnate in something current and at the same time faithful to its history, thus expanding its catchment area, or is it destined to remain confined to the niche created by and for the taranta lovers themselves?». In 2016, this interesting question concludes an article by Sonia Garcia on Vice Italia (Garcia 2016). Her piece asked vital questions about authorship, authenticity, and identity concerning the contemporary Italian music industry. Furthermore, it was the first article in recent times to question the potential of the South Italian music traditions in the field of electronic music.

According to Garcia, Italian pop music has very little to do with the local musical ecosystem that has historically characterized the entire peninsula. Her interpretation of the current Italian music scene harkens back to Anglo-American influences, which she considers a result of standardized and profit-making market dynamics. On the other hand, the writer suggests that some traditions like pizzica pizzica (often mistakenly called taranta) from Salento may be powerful grounds for experimental and unprecedented tendencies in the branches of Italian electronic music, specially considering the problems related to many Italian producers who «rather have a much greater interest for exotic sounds such as African, Asian or South American rhythms» (ibid.).

The discourses around the music traditions of the whole Italian peninsula are often a byproduct of the cultural and political climate of the 1970s through the 1990s. This period can be seen as an experimental ground as well as a crucial moment for opening up a conversation about South Italian local identities, usually subject to stigmatization and backwardness. It created chances to give birth to some prolific and independent music scenes, while also contributing to develop regional cultural industries in areas which were hit by structural socio-economic issues.

However, the political philosopher Francescomaria Tedesco would argue that the revival movements, singling out that of pizzica salentina, have been driven by intellectual classes who most of the time ended up portraying Southern Italy through the lense of «Mediterraneism». Tedesco considers the latter as a performative cultural and political trend / ideology based on processes of self-orientalization, which prompts the simplistic and exotified idea of a sea and its enclosing territory as an atemporal and archaic Mediterranean land, crossroad of people, as well as gateway to the «Orient».5

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I would personally consider it wrong to put the whole mosaic of Southern Italian folklore, traditions, and their derivatives, under this blanket. However, I still believe that the perspective evidenced by Tedesco plays a crucial role in the way folklore was collectively reimagined in the last fifty years. One example is the criticism he makes about the heavy interdependence between «intellectual» folk music circles and ethnomusicologist practices. This dynamic effectively risks boxing folk music into an anthropological experiment, or creating bands which are mostly led by the intention of re-enacting ethnomusicologist research under the guise of «tradition».6

Secondly, according to Camilla Hawthorn, who researched the concept of the Black Mediterranean, the widespread Italian academic rhetorics about the intercultural identity of the sea (the tendency that Tedesco similarly observes in some folk revival circles), even if driven by good intentions, can risk minimizing the dramatic militarization, border surveillance, racial violence, and the complications of contemporary diaspora ethics in Italy.7

The whole idea of folklore in Italy, including the South Italian one, has often been inscribed in the slippery labels of «world» and «ethnic music», an outdated container which should undoubtedly be challenged due to its rooted ties to the notion of the «exotic» (Kalia 2019). This is probably why, even in the realm of folk music scenes, not unlike the mainstream Italian music industry, there is still the need to confront some issues of cultural appropriation (or improbable «contaminations» with traditional sounds from other parts of the world).

1. The two scholars perseveringly encouraged local musicians involved in the folk revival to embrace the use of computers, synthesizers, and samplers with the aim of pushing the boundaries of Salento’s traditional music identity. During a whole decade, Fumarola and Lapassade organized lectures, workshops, and happenings regarding this topic inside the spaces of the Atheneum of Lecce, where Fumarola had a chair in sociology of religion. Unfortunately, there are not that many easily accessible documentations on video, papers, or online regarding the activities of Piero Fumarola and George Lapassade within the context of «tecnopizzica». For any English-speaking reader who wants to explore this topic further, I recommend reading the book «Dances with Spiders: Crisis, Celebrity and Celebration in Southern Italy» (2008) by Karen Lüdtke. Though rare, the most detailed books written in Italian are «Musica Droga e Transe. Materiali di ricerca» by Vincenzo Ampolo and Guglielmo Zappatore, as well as «Rap Copy. Materiale del Seminario itinerante ‹RAP-ETNIA-TRANSE›» (1991) and «Inchiesta sull’Hip Hop» (1992), both by Piero Fumarola and George Lapassade. One comprehensive online source is the recent article «Per un post-tarantismo dionisiaco e sovversivo» (2020) by Tobia D’Onofrio on XL Repubblica.
2. «Transpizzica» by Pierpaolo De Giorgi e I Tamburellisti di Torre Paduli is contained in the album «Pizzica e Trance» (1995). I had the opportunity to listen to the cassette of the album thanks to Ernesto Fumarola, who let me consult books, CDs, VHS, and other materials from his father’s studio.
3. To delve into this subject, I recommend watching the documentary on YouTube titled «Mascarimirì 10 anni la storia» (at 41:22). The video contains an interview with the Neapolitan musician Daniele Sepe who explains very well the kind of hostility towards electronic music present in the context of Salento’s folk music in the late 1990s.
4. Unfortunately, the majority of his early music productions were never released, and they are now lost inside some broken hard disks. One of the few remaining documents is one YouTube footage of a set played at the popular Salento folk music festival «La Notte Della Taranta».
5. The thesis claimed by Francescomaria Tedesco around the concept of «Mediterraneanism» as well as its link to the folk revival is very recurrent throughout his book «Mediterraneismo. Il pensiero anti meridiano» (2018).
6. It is probably for this reason, that while conducting some interviews, multiple artists who made experiments with «tecnopizzica» – and even a tambourine player – described the current revival folk scene of «pizzica salentina» as a «lie» or something «fake».
7. To explore the critique of the «Mediterraneism» further, I highly suggest listening to the podcast «Border Surveillance and the Black Mediterranean» by Camilla Hawthorne, assistant professor of sociology, UC Santa Cruz.