Audiovisual antimafia lounge, inspired by works and words of Leonardo Sciascia, sicilian writer and civil activist. Sicilian AV project means the legacy of literature performed and expressed with mixed mediums: music, visual arts and illustrations.

Have you ever heard of the mafia? You probably have, but it’s unlikely that you’ve heard it evoked in the rhythms of avant-garde, of electronic, of downtempo, mixed with unusual action-painting illustrations and highly suggestive real-life video clips.

Antonino Musco (last.fm user gagge)and his many collaborators at Sicilian AV Project, however, aren’t in it for the business: they aren’t selling catchy tunes or coloured bags and they don't talk about football. Most of them are Sicilian, all young and almost all emigrated to a hypothetical North as in their hyper-real South someone had clipped their wings, but not their ideas.

The authors and the participants in this performative project study and elaborate different languages to tell a tragic story made up of thousands of drammatic, grotesque, mafia tales. The intention is clear right from the very first track "Todo Modo" (My Way) in which the sampled voice of Leonardo Sciascia, a writer who wrote and spoke about the mafia until his death, reminds us that: “The State for me is the Constitution and the Constituion is no longer alive.” Within this and other heart-and-mind paradoxes the sound waves ebb and flow – calm, meditative emptiness syncopated with sour, lashing floodtides - which Antonino Musco melts and mixes, playing with hifi and lofi, tradition and avant-garde, street-talk and the words of the wise men from the three-horned island.

Contrasting landscapes, sultriness, the energy of orgy and of mourning, massacres and trials, the Mediterranean of permanent contradiction, of beauty and regret, of toil and anger, of Arabic poetry poured out like wine and Norman gold-drenched cathedrals, of life-long earthquake victims and murdered farm-hands, of Greek temples overlooking flower-studded coastlines and filthy slums where children and horses sleep and dream together in stables.

Sicilian AV Project offers us the blue sea and the pain of Sicily, a tuna trap where the actors of the terrible game, be they fishermen or fish, puppets and puppet-masters, are imbued with the acrid smell of blood and sweat, but also with the salty sweetness of what it could have been and was not, and what it is, today and fatalistically forever.

Just as in the last century the ethnomusicologist Antonino Uccello travelled past jails, huts and fishing-boats creating an archive of sounds and voices which now belong to the past, in the same way but following a different route, Antonino Musco directs those sleeping spectres to the rhythm of a drum-machine which recounts, in trans-Sicilian slang, the musicality of a dancing malaise.
(Gianluca Ferro)

Sicilian AV project:
Giuliano Cangiano (last.fm user kanjano) - illustrations // Pierpaolo Citrano - drums, percussions // Sebastiano Greco (last.fm user seby.greco) - visuals // Antonino Musco (last.fm user gagge) - director, keyboards, guitars, percussions, sampler // Giuseppe Salvaggio - upright and electric bass // Luigi Tresca (last.fm user L3SKA) - saxophones
Special Guests:
Gianluca Anastasi (last.fm user jazz-luca) - piano, electric piano // Vincenzo Consolo - voice // Shirin Demma - vocals // Giuseppe Erbesso - rhodes // Tommaso Galati - electric guitar // James Grellier - trumpet // Matteo Scurci - trumpet
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