Etta Scollo: ORA

An anthology of various texts, modern and contemporary, cultured and traditional, with some contributions from the author herself, is the thematic archipelago of a musical journey navigated by sight and whose only destination is poetry.

Topics such as the 'human condition' are examined in all their complexity: from the tension between life and death to the microcosm of everyday communication, but also to the tragic everydayness of the current war, which is compounded by the cry of pain for another war (Quasimodo). returns to remind us that the past is always present.

Topics such as the fate of every people, which is linked to that of its mother tongue, are condensed in a magnificent psycholinguistic treatise in Sicilian verse (Buttitta), and the drama of flight and migration is found in the eyes of a child who is incomprehensibly a stranger in is born in his country of birth. And again love, and then the verses of Scollo himself, which serve as a narrative thread in the form of a metatext of her own creative achievement.

The album was created in Etta's hometown of Catania, together with leading protagonists of the Italian music scene, the producer Taketo Gohara and the musician and sound engineer Niccolò Fornabaio.

Here, in the intimacy of a secluded room, circular - perhaps once a cooling oasis from the heat of the Scirocco wind - and acoustically congenial to the music, songs, voice and guitar are recorded live.

But the production is enriched by sophisticated instrumental sound structures and valuable collaborations: as in all of her projects, Scollo focuses on encounters with other artists and invites them to share their music in a friendly, uncomplicated and creative atmosphere.

The pearls of this project are a traditional piece interpreted entirely by the Mancuso brothers and - in a duet with the extraordinary Hanna Schygulla - a text by Bertold Brecht, set to music by Hanns Eisler, in the desperate search for trust in the goodness of the world dissolves his verses into those of a moving Sicilian lullaby.

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