SALGARI RECORDS: Procida Ritual Project

Salgari Records is proud to present “Misteri”, the new ALBUM by Procida Ritual Project. The Procida Ritual Project, with a strong anthropological and Mediterranean feel, was conceived by Pier Paolo Polcari.

Polcari is a composer and producer. He is also the co-founder of the iconic Italian World/Trip Hop band Almamegretta, together with the artist Leonardo Scotto di Monaco. Leonardo is a scholar of local traditions. The musicians Daniele Ubik (sax, percussion, hang and voices) and Marzouk Mejri (darbouka, Tunisian flute, voices and percussions) are also part of the founding team.

“Procida Ritual Project is not the romantic and visionary idea of an island anchored to its roots, but a convinced path aimed at giving new life to the sounds of ritual celebrations of the Procidan community.”

field-recordings

The “Procida Ritual Project” is developed within the “Procida Capital of Culture 2022” EU program and was born with the aim of valorizing tradition, protecting the past by projecting it into the future, preserving identities, making generations dialogue, with the aim of saving the enormous intangible cultural heritage of the island of Procida from extinction.

The project key is a database of “field-recordings” at the core of which we find the famous rites of “Holy Week and the Procession of the Mysteries”: a truly mine of identity made of symbols advancing in the footsteps of centuries-old echoes.

a collective rite

The first single “Ritual” resonates with devotional songs dedicated to Our Lady of Grace, which the faithful chant in July: a kind of dialectal rosary with ancestral sounds and tones. And again, cues for the construction of this project come from the dialect novena that, at the end of October, on the long eve of the celebration of the dead, the faithful are wont to sing in a collective rite created to exorcise death.

The ancient matrices, which will remain recognizable, give life to suggestive paths of authorial re-elaboration in electronic key, with the contribution of important multi-instrumentalist musicians.

The amazing artwork is by Federico Spini, who reworked the valuable photographic material by Roberta Riccio, in which the “Turchini” are portrayed during the Good Friday procession.