‘What do I do now that I no longer have my mother?” Lero Lero sing on Com’haiu a Fari, the opening track of their self-titled debut album. “If I still had my mother, I would not love you.” What may sound like the kind of honest self-reckoning a modern songwriter has dragged out of therapy sessions is actually a traditional Sicilian folk text once sung by a washerwoman, reimagined here through three voices modelled on Sicilian Settimana Santa polyphonies. For this Palermo collective, maternal loss is also metaphor: symbolic of Sicily’s ruptured cultural inheritance, which they recover through archival labour songs, carters’ cries and lullabies, then reshape through electronics and microtonal instrumentation.
In the Italian imagination, Sicily has long been more than the island at the country’s southern edge. It has functioned as a symbolic South, carrying fantasies of archaic beauty and rural authenticity alongside associations with poverty, criminality and backwardness. Its culture is often romanticised and patronised at once.
