PETROLIO - Club Atletico Voces y Gritos

Enrico Cerrato, the man behind the industrial project Petrolio, reaches his tenth year of activity with “Club Atletico Voces y Gritos”, a new piece that enriches his dark-ambient catalogue, reworking instrumental tracks already released in 2021 with the contribution of numerous guests. Petrolio has always been an openly cinematic project, and the new “Club Atletico Voces y Gritos” heightens its narrative dimension even further. The five tracks follow one another forming a single thread (this is essentially an electroacoustic concept album), helped along by the voices of just as many musicians who, in a thoroughly original way, tell stories from the South America of the Seventies and Eighties, torn apart by brutal military dictatorships that crushed every form of freedom and eliminated an untold number of dissidents.

Enrico Cerrato employs different voices to give voice to those who lost theirs forever, as in “La Picana”, featuring the vocals of Pierpaolo Capovilla. The picana is an instrument of torture used by the regime of Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla (“First we will eliminate the subversives, then their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then those who remain indifferent, and finally the undecided”) and by his Chilean counterpart Pinochet (“The rich are those who produce money, and they must be treated well so they produce more”). Those were the Seventies, a decade in which the United States forcibly toppled elected governments to make way for compliant generals: a horror that resonates powerfully in Cerrato's noise chaos and in Capovilla's alienated vocal, which sounds like the strangled voice of someone breathing their last, emitting incomprehensible sounds.

Giulia Parin Zecchin (Julinko, Bosco Sacro) sings on “El Silencio”, a dark-ambient track dedicated to the countless desaparecidos. “2403” opens the album recalling March 24, 1976, the day of Videla's coup in Argentina, with a dreamlike downtempo rhythm, almost a funeral elegy sung by Breanna Johnston, voice of the Canadian dream-pop band Pallas Athene. Feedback and distortion form the backdrop to “Y Nadie Queria Saber” (“And no one wanted to know”), where the voice of OvO's Stefania Pedretti unfolds like a disturbing spoken word piece, in which speech and screams overlap like a dialogue between deaf people, underlining the complicity of those who did nothing to stop what was happening.
“Strangled Cry”, featuring Lynette Cerezo of Bestial Mouths, closes the album with a vocal that is constantly interrupted, as if to underscore the impossibility of putting into simple words the unspeakable pain caused by those terrible years.

If Cerrato, with his project, has always sought to build a narrative within the world of experimental music, with “Club Atletico Voces y Gritos” he reaches the fullest potential of storytelling, no small feat for a music whose primary trait is abstraction.

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29/06/2026