Album of the day: Almamegretta, “Lingo”

Almamegretta
“Lingo” (RCA CD 74321548252)

Lingo is a burning ember, it heats up the atmosphere but you have to be careful to handle it with care so as not to get burned.
This group of Neapolitan musicians understood from the very beginning (with the albums “Animamigrante” and “Sanacore”) that in the South the wind mixes and carries the breaths of many different peoples, coming from Italy, Africa and the Middle East.
The four talented sound explorers have added new flavours to all this, American and Anglo-Saxon, moving between Naples, London and New Jersey, involving a large number of different guests, from Pino Daniele to Bill Laswell, from Count Dubulah (bassist of TransGlobal Underground) to New York rappers like Dre Love and Dave Watts of Fun-Da-Mental; and then the strings of Pasquale Minieri, the very powerful beats programmed by Gennaro T.

the shamanic voice of Raiz and the hypnotic sound of the Dub effects of D.RaD (unfortunately tragically disappeared in 2004 in a car accident); a thousand sounds,.
noises, voices, low frequencies that get the blood flowing again, sharp guitars, ancestral frame drum timbres that mix with hip-hop samplings and obsessive rhythms, multicolored electronic sounds, shouts and songs all united together in a new slang (Lingo, precisely) at the same time experimental and accessible, with an international scope and deeply rooted in their own culture. It is no coincidence that Almamegretta are among the few Italian groups to have attracted the interest of personalities such as Adrian Sherwood, Massive Attack, Leftfield, Asian Dub Foundation.

Followed by a loyal army of admirers, who crowd their concerts everywhere, Almamegretta have succeeded where many other “contaminators” of languages ​​have failed; their project does not superficially assemble suggestions from other cultures to create culturally neocolonialist products: in their records you can feel that these voices coming from different lands are an integral part of the culture of those who have listened to them, filtered them and reused them in a different context.
It takes not only acumen and taste but also a particular feeling to create this kind of musical hybrid; songs like “Suonno”, “Rootz”, “Gramigna”, “Black Athena” and “Fatmah” are some of the most intense sparks of this musical flint.

Carlo Boccadoro, composer and conductor, was born in Macerata in 1963. He lives and works in Milan. He collaborates with soloists and orchestras in different parts of the world. He is the author of numerous books on musical subjects.

This text is taken from “Lunario della musica: Un disco per ogni giorno dell’anno” published by Einaudi, courtesy of the author and the publisher.