music and poetry
twelve o’clock, November 15, 2021 – 13:06
The Tot Poetry Culture tour will go around Italy. On stage the journalist and poet Gianni Valentino and the musician Lello Tramma: a melting pot of sounds accompanies the verses of Antonio De Curtis and projects them into a futuristic and digital segment
from Giuliano Delli Paoli
A musical experiment created to transport Tot’s poems into a futuristic and digital segment. The upstream mission of Tot Poetry Culture as ambitious as it is unprecedented. The artistic project of the journalist, poet and performer Gianni Valentino and of the producer and musician Lello Tramma was born with the noble intention of sounding the poems of the Neapolitan prince par excellence with an analog approach that makes use of a decidedly rich instrumentation: oud, piano, synth, guitars, theremin, cello, trumpet, saz, bass. Tot Poetry Culture debuted online on August 11 with a first track mashup of two Tot poems, Illiterate Core and Lost Love. A date that is anything but casual, given that on the same day in 1951, for the Festa di Piedigrotta labeled La Canzonetta, Malafemmena was performed for the first time in the theater by the singer Mario Abbate.
L’idea
In the coming months the two Neapolitan artists will present new music combined with de Curtis lyrics. One day in early March – says Valentino – wandering around the house, I had a flash vision: “This year Malafemmena turns 70, okay, but Tot has written hundreds of poems. What rhythm do those lines have? What emotional value can they still express today? As happened once for a literary-musical tribute that I made to the Iranian videoartist Shirin Neshat at the Madre Museum, in the company of Raiz and Paolo Polcari, also in this case I understood instantly what the itinerary was: Tot wants electronic music because this triggers a total magmatic hairdryer. An electronics that includes ambient, dub, soul, funk, edm, sufi, house spaces. Within a few minutes I thought about Lello Tramma, about our affective and artistic understanding, and I proposed the project to him. He went mad with joy. We had never actually made music together, as a duo, and this made the process very incendiary. In two and a half months, between the recording studio and remote work in their respective homes, we composed eleven tracks on the writings of Antonio de Curtis, in a free and independent way.
Electronic melting pot
The sounds created by the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Lello Tramma, frontman of Palkoscenico – a dub-rock band that over the years has shared the stage with music greats such as Khaled, Francesco De Gregori, Elio and the tense stories, Caparezza, Enzo Avitabile , Motel Connection, Max Gazz -, in fact form an electronic melting pot of genres such as dub, trip-hop, exotica, and act as a rhythmic carpet for the theatrical interpretation of Valentino, who for the occasion wears the role of the narrator in spoken mode word, a “singing” technique entirely based on spoken poetry made famous by unforgettable musicians such as the American Gil Scott-Heron and updated by contemporary talents such as the English Kae Tempest, fresh from the Silver Lion for poetry at the Venice Biennale for the Theater . For the music of Tot Poetry Culture – reveals Tramma – I extracted the “freshest” part that I had at hand from my sound sample. Some melodies and rhythms immediately appeared very suitable for the lines of certain poems; for others, the creation instead took place by reading, studying, absorbing every single word. Together with Gianni the drafting of the tracks was spontaneous and symbiotic. Our tastes and our sensations have found an immediate meeting point. But the key moment was when I started arranging strings and winds on some songs. I opted for classic instruments on digital sounds and beats, mixing everything with moog, synth jen, theremin, an old Farfisa organ, a late nineteenth century piano, Novation Supernova, delay, phaser, various filters and new generation Apps with a myriad of modular sounds. Classical guitar, oud, sampled citar, filtered voices, effected drums and noises organized on a staff, characterize our sonic territory.
The red jacket
Instrumental choices that, however extroverted do not clash with Tot’s naive poetics, giving life to a complex experiment on paper, starting with the selection of the words to be set to music, as Valentino explains: I chose the poems with two criteria in symbiosis: I wanted to summarize the verses about Naples, females, the family, the marginalized from society, the profession of artist, loneliness. Naturally the priority was the prosody of words, which music today expands and multiplies thanks to the search for an ad hoc sound that synthesizes the music we love: from Ryksopp to Pink Floyd, from Massive Attack to Depeche Mode, from Angelo Badalamenti to Jaydee and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the Underworld. And we are happy to have received the emotions and reactions of Elena Anticoli de Curtis, granddaughter of the Prince, who has already listened to all these experiments in the summer and continues to support us with her proud confidence. And he continues: In the production phases of the tracks and also of the filming for the video clips we perceived several alien signals, or divine if you prefer. Almost Tot’s presence was among us every moment. Interlocking dates, places, people, objects. I confess one: in a market I recovered a red jacket almost identical to the one that Tot wore in the film “The most comical show in the world” and also in some cut scenes from the film “Uccellacci e uccellini” by Pasolini.
The tour and the Christmas single
The duo’s first live, held last November 2 at the Auditorium 900 on the occasion of the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of Bad luck, it was just a taste of a live path that in the coming months will take the two artists around Italy. After all these months of research, processing and recording – says Valentino – we have finally become aware of what can happen in the performance. Now the whirlwind desire to tour in Italy and abroad as well. Neapolitan poetry and electronic music are a passport everywhere, we hope. While November, although full autumn, will be a lush month: first of all, the second track of Tot Poetry Culture will be released, the video clip of “Che me mancante”, and we will publish at least four songs on digital platforms. So the people who are approaching us with passion and curiosity will have additional content to enjoy. At Christmas instead, a single will be released: on one side, “Malafemmena” and on the other, so to speak, an unpublished profile of “Malafemmena”. We do not act on marketing theories and commercial assumptions. We want to play beyond the canonical rules of what works and trends. Trusting that the boys understand this and understand that Tot is a galaxy to explore.
November 15, 2021 | 13:06
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