It's a lazy August afternoon. Dario and Francesco meet to start recording Fracargio's new single.

The material produced is not bad, good first take. But something makes them dissatisfied. The sound of the various “friscaletti” (sicilian recorder instruments), overdubbed and combined with electronics, lacks something.

Dario's bookcase has a beautiful section dedicated to Sicilian culture in which a poetic anthology in several volumes stands out. Francesco well knows it because he has it too. He opens the volume dedicated to the sixteeth century and the first poem that leaps to the eye is by an unknown poet, Tubiolo Benfare.

"Let's do another take," says Francesco.

"This time use the cane flute you made yourself" suggests Dario.

"But it's crude! Hard to manage!"

"Better this way, it's more authentic".

The piece Fa focu amuri comes out based on that poem. Poetry is added to the sound of instruments and electronics, read, screamed, sung, whispered, processed with electronics, dissected until it becomes pure sound.

Listening again they realize that the song recorded first used the same melodic fragments as this one. Now the two songs have that something that was missing and that satisfies the authors. They decide to add a poem by Antonio Veneziano that seems to fit perfectly. A verse of the poem gives the title to the piece, Morti duci.

Sicilian literature will be the theme of this track and the album that will follow. And there will be many musicians involved. So far, alongside Dario T. Pino (electronics, synths, programming) and Francesco Lipari (flutes, vocals, percussion) have participated: Carmen Mazzeo (baroque flutes), Carmelo Giambò (accordion), Giovanni Alibrandi (violin), Alessandro Monteleone (guitar). The recording sessions will resume in the spring with other artists.

Will it satisfy you too?

One day Dario T. Pino and Francesco Lipari invite for lunch Giovanni Arena, a double bass player from Catania with whom they share their compositional training with Alessandro Solbiati.

Giovanni was thrilled with the idea of ​​improvising with them. From that meeting the single Agni Parthene was born, based on a non-liturgical Orthodox devotional song dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

Why an Orthodox chant? The deep roots of Sicily are Greek and until the Romanization of the rite also the liturgy and faith were Greek-Byzantine. It has a symbolic, not a scientific meaning. We talked more about it in the previous article.

Francesco, multi-instrumentalist, chooses the bass flute: melodic fragments of the piece are recomposed to lead to the literal quotation of the melody, several times, in the finale. It is like a puzzle that arises from the individual pieces which, piled up on a table, do not give the idea of ​​the final picture, if not for some detail.

Listening guide

The piece is nourished by contrasts: tradition and modernity, transcendence and immanence, polyphony and monody, voice and instrument. Contrasts that run throughout the piece, at times exalted and at other times canceled (as if to give that sense of inner serenity so longed for).

A bordone is the background to the whole piece. It is A note sung on a very low A that sometimes disappears, others emerges, others dominates everything else. From the bordone the two instruments, double bass and bass flute, emerge, playing only noises with every possible means: with the bow beaten, rubbed, with the breath in the instrument, in short, the entire body of the instrument becomes a sounding board. The choice of noise is deliberate and strong. If we think about it, the noise was born well before the sound. They are noises that we hear for the most part around us; noises are what the first instruments ever built – the percussions - produce.

The double bass begins the piece. Around the first minute, the breath of the flute is added which becomes an amplification of the performer's breath, or rather of the breathing, that is, of life. From here and for four minutes, the performers show off their technical and expressive skill by building a sort of counterpoint between the instruments. An emotional crescendo seasoned with the reverberations and resonances of electronics.

 Immediately afterwards the bordone is silent for about a minute and a half; the instruments emerge continuing the path of approaching the sound, the melody, which finally reveals itself in its severe and hieratic majesty at minute 6:22. It is the apotheosis of melodic conquest. All the sound components of the piece come together in a sort of sonic orgy that goes out in the same initial silence.

On February 28 the new single “Fa focu amuri” will be released by Fracargio The complete album will be released on September 28, 2021. The first EP of the group, Agni Parthene, dates back to 2018.

There is some continuity between the two works, to the point that Fa focu amuri seems to start again from where Agni Parthene left off. This is why we decided to tell you a story every week for each of the four songs contained in that debut album.

The Fracargio ensemble was a surprise for its own founders, Dario T. Pino and Francesco Lipari [LINK diaphonia]. In 2015 they often got together improvising for instruments and live electronics. There was neither a planning nor a vision: it was a workshop. Between a coffee and a rehearsal, a beer and a debate on readings and records heard, the two musicians understood that the tools they forged were what they had been looking for for years, without knowing it.

The decisive element, missing in that embryonic experience, was a common passion of the two artists: the music of the Sicilian people.

Moved by a spirit of research, they conduct an investigation into Sicilian culture in general: the first album would be based on the presence of popular materials and the leitmotif would have been devotion. The four songs are in fact based on two songs of devotion: Agni Parthene, an Orthodox song dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Misereri, a Sicilian song with the Latin text of Psalm 50, used until a few years ago in the Holy Week rites in Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto (ME).

What does an Orthodox song have to do with Sicily? It has a symbolic value. Sicily has its roots in Greek culture. Even the liturgy was Greek-Byzantine up to the Romanization, which was, in a certain sense, imposed from above. This is not the place for historical disquisitions, but a clarification was necessary.

From the original songs a double parallelism was created:

Agni Parthene – Sognando Agni Parthene
Mismedo – Misereri

Popular music research must not mislead: Agni Parthene is not a popular music record. Far from it. You can listen to the songs by clicking on the playlists below to get a clearer idea. We give you an appointment next week to learn more about the individual songs contained in the disc.

Link to Youtube playlist

A double thread connects this piece to Mismedo. Here the inspiration from the original piece is present with an initial bell toll that evokes a mystical atmosphere.

The piece was conceived for its world premiere on June 16, 2017 in Barcelona PG and replicated a month later in Berlin.

Listening guide

The song that concludes the album is not a simple track inserted to complete the work but a real synthesis of Fracargio's thought. Indeed more: it completes the work and lays the foundations for the future. Certainly then we could not know what development our artistic thought would have had, but in the light of what will be the next release we can say that it is a prophetic work.

But let's go in order. The sound of the initial bell makes us return to the mystical-religious atmosphere of the first two pieces, reversing, however, the perspective: we are not inside the sound, but outside, as observers. Once again the beginning of the path is given by a noise: at minute 1:20 the breath of Francesco Lipari begins a slow and inexorable journey that will lead us to the discovery of a world made of sounds, noises, songs that will soon make part of our imagination.

In the meantime, the sound of the bell, which we also hear upside down, slowly begins to fracture, to become jagged until it almost disappears into sound dust by means of the granulation technique. Everything mixes with the sounds-noise produced by the performer who continues in the path of approaching the instrumental sound. Instrumental sound that arrives, around 6:30, from the vibraphone played with the violin bow: an extended technique of the instrument that transforms its temporal envelope, but leaving its timbre component substantially unchanged. This sound is immediately captured by the electronic component and further processed.

Just before the tenth minute the atmosphere becomes almost dreamlike. Various sound objects mix in a static and aimless aura, until the return of the sound of the bell marks the entrance of the song on the scene. Francesco's voice seems to seek the intonation of a song as if it emerged from his ancestral memory: a simple song, almost a childish dirge, but with a vibrant expressive force. And at 12:30 here it is, emerging as a ghost from the past, the song of the Miserere in the sicilian song makes its appearance and closes the circle of the path we were talking about at the beginning. It is from here that Fracargio started for his sound research in the work that will follow Agni Parthene. A path that sees the Sicilian language and being Sicilian at the center of his artistic reflection in the ambitious attempt to free this language and its culture from the ghetto of folklore alone to which they are unfairly placed.