Brigan - Terra Felix Sound System

We meet up with the Campanian band on the occasion of "Liburia Trip", an album that draws its lifeblood as much from the traditions of the so-called Terra Felix of Caserta, also known as Liburia or Terra di Lavoro, as from electronic music, Celtic and Armenian sounds, and the traditional singing of Torgeir Vassvik, the leading ambassador of Sami culture. A record that's one of a kind, from a band constantly on the move.

Where does the idea of singing about and setting to music life in the countryside of the Caserta area come from?

“Liburia Trip” is the result of these last few years of work and research towards a language, both sonic and narrative, that's increasingly hybrid. Starting in 2009, our records have tried to follow a common thread: the meeting of different cultures, sounds and languages. Having explored much of the music and repertoire of the Celtic world, and in particular of the Iberian peninsula, “Liburia Trip” marks a homecoming, to our land and our roots, seen from a personal perspective and point of view, with no philological or ethnomusicological pretensions whatsoever. It's not traditional music from the Caserta area, nor a mere re-proposal of it: it's simply the need to express our current vision of this territory and of those who inhabit it, without setting aside our cultural/musical background, both individual and as a group.

How much have paganism and Arab influences shaped your music?

Inevitably, the roots, history and various cultural declinations of our territory have clearly influenced the compositional aspect of the whole record, especially the narrative side. Our gaze on the past, which flowed into “Liburia Trip”, isn't nostalgic in nature, but is simply a way of observing and bearing witness to an inevitable, ongoing process.

For “Liburia Trip” you used field recordings and interviews, both archival and ones you carried out yourselves. Can you tell us an anecdote from this experience that somehow conveys your emotional core?

Throughout the whole compositional process, storytelling plays a major role. The narrative we tried to build drew great inspiration from the various materials we gathered in the field, both firsthand and archival. Everything found cohesion with the childhood stories that our memory has preserved, from our grandparents as well as from various elderly people in the village. On the track “E dopp’ n’anno” we decided to include the testimony that moved us more than any other: the remembered voice of Gennaro Montesano, whom we had the chance to meet a few years ago, and who, with his simple, touching words, recounts with great melancholy a now-lost time when greenery, nature and hemp fields gave way and ground to the great blanket of concrete and cement that increasingly invades our towns.

Not just tradition and folk music, but plenty of electronics too. When and how did the idea come about to blend it all together?

After a very long period in which our sound was mainly tied to acoustic instruments, in recent years the desire arose to expand our sonic possibilities by embracing new media and new technologies. Meeting Andrea Laudante was crucial to starting this long process of experimentation. Our ongoing hybridization of musical languages, which until a few years ago was mainly linked to the meeting of different repertoires, finds expression in “Liburia Trip” especially on a sonic and compositional level. The initial idea was to set off a process of creation and a completely borderline sound, in which the expressive line would oscillate between tradition and the present day, without falling too much into one or the other.

“’A terra d’ ‘e mazzune” is dedicated to fertility and to the female figure of the buffalo. Is it a way of exorcising the increasingly infertile and battered Terra Felix, which today, alas, is also known as the Land of Fires?

Yes. For us this song is a kind of hymn to our totemic, female animal, which more than any other represents the fertility of this land. It's certainly a way of exorcising the devastated Terra Felix, which for decades has suffered the ordeal linked to the so-called “land of fires” issue, and the ever-growing, unchecked concreting-over that each year makes this territory less green and less livable. In conceiving and creating the whole album, we tried to set aside the complexities and difficulties of living amid urban sprawl and decay, focusing the message instead on shedding new light on the beauty, history and fertility of this land: all this not in a museum-like way, or as a mere re-proposal of tradition, but by creating, starting from the past and from our roots, a new narrative and sonic universe, in which rituals, symbols and characters coexist with the present, with new media and electronics. With “Liburia Trip” we try to make a few flowers bloom from the concrete, through a form of cultural resistance that we've been carrying forward for several years now through our music and our way of seeing the world.

Records, books, poems, influences that have accompanied you on your journeys.

The list would be very long, especially since we're three musicians coming from completely different musical and cultural backgrounds. Certainly the shared sources we drew on to create this project span different languages, eras and experiences. Without doubt, what emerges in our group's background is a passion for and study of the great pillars of Italian ethnomusicology: from De Martino to De Simone, by way of dialect poetry – not necessarily from Campania – such as the works of Rocco Scotellaro, all the way to the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his sharp gaze on the outskirts of society, the ancient world and the marginalized.

What are your musical points of reference

Musically, the influences we poured into “Liburia Trip” come from various sources, some of them quite distant from one another: from electroacoustic and experimental music all the way to the various branches of world music. Among our main points of reference, we should certainly mention figures ranging from Antonio Infantino to Rodrigo Cuevas, by way of Csi, Brian Eno and Sakamoto.

“To feel at home among things and in the world you live in. That is 'homeland'”, in the words of Mario Rigoni Stern. A fresh, genuine kind of patriotism. So, what is your idea of “homeland”?

For us, the sense of homeland is inevitably tied to our cultural and linguistic roots and to the social dynamics that surround us. In the same way, it's also a deep sense of belonging to the memories and places where we were born and grew up, where, despite the difficulties tied to the many problems affecting the area, we believe we can keep creating and sowing positivity, especially through art and music.

I know you've traveled extensively and often met musicians in the most remote or forgotten corners. Tell us about one of these artistic/human encounters, maybe the one that struck you the most.

Throughout our musical output, the aspect tied to travel and to collaborations with foreign musicians has always been central to our attention, and has always been a great incentive to get to know and draw closer to musical traditions different from our own. On "Liburia Trip" we had the pleasure of involving, among our guests, two great exponents of distant and deeply rooted traditions, who welcomed our proposal and our vision of music with joy. Checchinella, who performed the traditional "Chiagnuta 'e Carnavale", is one of the last voices of the tradition of the lower Caserta area, while on the track "Mater Matuta" it was a profound privilege to be given the gift of a traditional song performed by Torgeir Vassvik, the leading ambassador of Sami culture, the ancient musical tradition of northern Norway. On one hand, Cecchinella's choice was to bring a voice that embodies our own tradition and reinterpret it in our own way, while with Vassvik, whom we met at Womex 2021 and with whom a strong friendship formed right away, we found common ground in our approach to research and in the way we recreate, in the present, worlds and traditions that are falling into oblivion.

What's your approach to musical contemporaneity and, more generally, to mainstream music, if any?

Brigan stands for total openness, free of any kind of prejudice. What certainly binds us together as a group is our constant curiosity when it comes to listening to anything at all, trying to absorb the best from every possible experience. For us, listening is a fundamental phase, a starting point in the long process of building our own language and our own musical identity.

Where will you be playing next?

On Saturday, June 17th, we presented our album in Naples with a live show at the former Asilo Filangieri, and in the coming weeks the various dates for the following months will be announced on our social media channels.

(Photo by Riccardo Piccirillo)

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