Agricantus - Mediterranean ethno-trance

Sicily's Agricantus (from the Latin for "song of the wheat") are Italy's most important world music act. Their repertoire draws on the sounds of the desert and the world's peripheries, but also on rock's hypnotic rhythms and the traditional music of the Mediterranean, from southern Italy's "taranta" to Middle Eastern and North African folk. It's a sonic blend made all the more striking by a setup that combines ethnic stringed and wind instruments alongside the most sophisticated electronic technology.

Agricantus formed in Palermo in 1979, and in their early years devoted themselves to rediscovering South American and Andean cultures, with particular attention to the Nueva Canción Chilena, from which the group would inherit its approach to popular culture. This experience led the members, a few years later, to turn their attention to the ethnic traditions of southern Italy, reworked, deconstructed and reinvented using archaic performance techniques and instruments set within modern soundscapes (above all trance and ambient music). This is how experimental works such as Nachitabumma (1989), Agàve: Maavro (1989), Gnanzù! (1993) and Viaggiari (1995) came about.

The group truly established itself from the early '90s onward, with the arrival of Swiss singer Rosie Wiederkerhr, giving rise to a lineup that also included Tony Acquaviva (male vocals, percussion, traditional instruments, keyboards, samplers), Giuseppe Panzeca (mandolin, sitar, voice), Mario Crispi (ethnic and traditional wind instruments) and Mario Rivera (bass, voice, programming). This lineup created the ambitious Tuareg, recorded in the Malian desert with nomadic instruments and musicians (part of the album's proceeds went toward funding innovative "nomadic" education programs). The album, a refined cocktail of cross-cultural, exotic sounds, won the Premio Tenco and reached No. 6 on the World Music Charts Europe. Adding to Agricantus's magic is the enchanting voice of Rosie Wiederkehr, who imbues the melodies with the hypnotic sensuality of passion, her extraordinary vocalizations borrowed from Berber women and from an age-old musical tradition.

Riding this wave of success, Agricantus also won the Nomadi award for their tribute to Augusto Daolio, as well as the Premio Italiano della Musica for best group in the Frontiera category. The band went on to release the mini-CD Hale-Bopp Souvenir (1997), featuring Fadimata Wallet Oumar, a spokesperson for the most authentic Tuareg culture, and Kaleidos (1998), a striking experiment in cross-pollination with classical music, in which Agricantus rub shoulders with great composers such as Grieg, Paganini, Brahms, Albinoni, Bartók and Berio.

In 1999 came Best of Agricantus, released under license with the World Class label, which distributed it not only in the US but also in Canada, South America, Australia and Japan. Within a few weeks the album topped the American and Australian radio charts, thanks to its gripping, refined songs, from "Com'u ventu" (originally also featured on the compilation "Canti sudati", released by Il Manifesto) to "Carizzi d'amuri", from "Hala hala" to "Amatevi", from "Occhi chi nascinu" to the splendid closer "Loosin".

Also in 1999 came Faiddi, a collection of their best tracks rearranged and reinterpreted live, which also became the soundtrack to the photographic exhibition "On Their Side", organized by Unicef to mark the tenth anniversary of the UN's adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The band's film work was equally intense, yielding successful soundtracks, from the excellent score for Ferzan Ozpetek's Il Bagno Turco (together with Pivio and Aldo de Scalzi of Trascendental), to I Giardini dell'Eden and Placido Rizzotto.

In February 2001 came Ethnosphere, two distinct albums representing two different visions of life, spirituality and earthly physicality, told through a journey that this time unfolds in the ethereal atmospheres of Buddhist Tibet. The sixteen tracks on the record, the product of a year's work, were inspired by texts written by Tonj Acquaviva and Rosie Wiederkehr as part of the multimedia project "Welt Labyrinth", launched in support of the struggle for Tibetan independence. The first of the two CDs consists of songs sung in Sicilian, German, English and Latin, alongside Tibetan mantras centered mainly on mysticism and spiritual themes. The second CD is closer to Agricantus's usual sound, featuring lyrics in Spanish and French as well as the Maghrebi Arabic of "Mellit", featuring guest singer Nour Eddine.

An all-round work, in short, that further enriches the Agricantus repertoire, rounded out live with original covers of Franco Battiato, Patti Smith and Sinéad O'Connor. "Our music is constantly evolving," they explain, "but its roots still lie in ethnic music in the strictest sense, in that 'trance' dimension we found in nomadic cultures and in elements drawn from southern Italy."

Calura (2002) is a collection of previously released tracks, revitalized through remixes made by Agricantus themselves as well as by Keir & Matthew and Dj Rocca.

The band's now-international standing, hailed in America too as one of the finest European world music acts, was cemented with Habibi (2005), which showcased two striking new tracks, the title track and "Anima", while "Ciavula", "Occhi chi nascinu" and "Teleja" are new versions of three of the most acclaimed songs from their live shows.

Visibility was also given to a few individual paths that did not involve the whole group, but were instead the result of solo recording projects: Mario Crispi with the splendid "Mari niuru" (featuring the duduk, the didjeridu, the Persian ney and a Rajasthani flute), Mario Rivera with "Su dilluru", a drum'n'bass reworking of traditional Sardinian songs, and Welt Labyrinth, a duo made up of Tonj Acquaviva and Rosie Wiederkehr.

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