Alessandra Eramo's 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.
Alessandra Eramo 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: voice, electronics, field recordings, theremin, harmonica.
Alessandra Eramo (born 1982 in Taranto, South Italy, lives and works in Berlin), also known under her artist name
Ezramo, is an Italian-German sound artist, vocalist and composer who works primarily with voice and noise. She was trained in classical singing, piano and music theory since an early age, studied intermedial arts, experimental music and performance in Milan, Stuttgart and Venice. Through performance, video, drawings and installation, she investigates the tension between vocality and writing, the phonetics, the physicality and trance-like states in singing. The essence of her practice is to destabilize the normal expectations of voice, body and identity in order to trace a new sense of beauty in sound and language. Her artistic production focuses on the juxtaposition between pleasure and disturbance, fragility and power, memory and the present, public space and intimacy.
See also
Ezramo.
