Alessandra Eramo, voice, electronics, field recordings, theremin, harmonica.
Alessandra Eramo’s new solo album Tracing South is a sonic enchantment through the use of extended vocal techniques, analog electronics and her hypnotic field recording of bagpipe (zampogna) during the Carnival rites in Southern Italy.
She shapes mouth noises, breath, whispers, her invented languages, fragmented words, the sound of old tape recorders, handmade theremin and synth, and she creates a sound poetry composition that seems to evolve into a shamanic trance music. Polyphonic singing, repetition, dissonance and overtones are tearing the listener out of the comfort zone.
Tracing South is centered on the last three years of her artistic research and concerts in Europe, the Mediterranean region and Chile. Reflecting on the Mediterranean Sea as a human and spiritual dimension, as a crossroad for cultural exchanges and passages of all sorts, but now also as a vast and silent migrant cemetery, Eramo’s work oscillates between the caress of tender melodies and the brutal energy of noise eruptions.
She says ”Like the sound of the sea, repetitive, always different and in constant moving, I’m interested to explore the concepts of Global South and Instability, by tracing a South as a non-geographical condition, an imaginary sonic cosmos, which is open, crude and undefined, giving space to conscious freedom of the listener.”
Alessandra Eramo is best known for her extraordinary and unconventional vocal performance art, with a prolific concert activity in the context of contemporary music, and also having a career as artist with the production of audiovisual works, drawings and installations.