CESARE BASILE - Nivura Spoken

A little more than a year ago came "Saracena", an album refined in its sound and articulate in its political stance. An excellent work that, placing the concept of separation at its center, set out to sing of the Nakba, the forced exodus of Palestinian Arabs and a tragedy that has returned to the present. Cesare Basile is completely free of any market logic or stylistic trend. He's one of the few artists left on the Italian scene still able to make records in which the underground increasingly winks at the mainstream. What strikes you is his craftsmanship as a musician, managing to surprise without ever becoming overexposed. He's a craftsman in the most literal sense too, building, modifying and reworking his own instruments. To this he adds the versatility of a thirty-year career in which he has always looked beyond geographic and sonic borders.

This long preamble is necessary to introduce "Nivura Spoken", but to fully understand it we also need to place its conception in context. We're in the middle of the pandemic, spring 2020. In a recent interview Cesare himself said he didn't want to make a conventional album, but something more attuned to the extraordinary period the world was living through. He adds that he wasn't very inclined to play guitar at the time, preferring instead to turn to electronics. So, after various twists and turns, on May 16, released by the Catania-based label Viceversa Records, "Nivura Spoken" came out.

First and foremost, this is an album we could call dystopian both in its sound and in the way lyrics and music are juxtaposed. An articulated structure that also features spoken-word as a further framework, a tradition rooted in blues but whose origins actually go back to ancient Greece, when the speeches of the wise were set to music and performed during the Olympics. A hybrid work, mixed-blood as ever, but with its parameters redrawn once again this time. Seven tracks, 27 minutes of experimentation and darkness ("Nivura", after all, means "Black" in Sicilian dialect).

After an opening, eponymous intro track that's more digestible and hints at desert blues shadings, we descend into the six circles that follow, each one featuring a female voice as protagonist. Women, accomplished artists and fellow travelers whom Cesare asked to ferry the listener through his sonic visions. Each one performs in her own language or dialect.

"U me zogu cor diavu" is a reworking of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil", narrated by Rita Oberti in a mountain dialect from Liguria, framed by industrial and noise textures. In "Nisun al da na vos" Sara Ardizzoni's voice blends with evocative, hypnotic sounds that seem to rise from the simmering of distant, sulfurous lands. "Cosmo" could be a theatrical piece: Nada Malanima's voice seems to arrive from another dimension, its alienating lyrics scratched by violent bursts of noise.

Vera Di Lecce lends her voice to a "synthetic" reworking of the traditional Salento song "Aremu Rindinedda", while Valentina Lupica reinterprets a text by Franco Scaldati over an already bare sonic backdrop from Basile.

"Frustration" is truly remarkable. The lyrics, written by Palestinian rapper Sarah Elkahlout, are shaped by Basile into a post-rock framework: the music grants the vocal the sacredness it deserves — for verses this intense, sent from Sarah's battered homeland, all one can do is feel respect.

Cesare Basile, in short, once again proves himself an artist capable of moving his gaze through time and space. He turns time into a tool of knowledge and space into a means of expression, crossing both dimensions in every direction without any boundaries, and bringing together seemingly irreconcilable worlds.

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24/05/2025