Roberta Gulisano – A ccu apparteni (Mhodí Music Company, 2024)

At first listen, A Ccu Apparteni by Roberta Gulisano feels like a dispatch from a forgotten corner of the Mediterranean. However, listen closer, and you will discover that this album is far from a simple exercise in regional nostalgia. Rather, it is an act of reclamation, a deeply personal yet profoundly universal meditation on identity, exile, and resilience.

Gulisano, a Sicilian singer-songwriter with a clear-eyed understanding of her roots, has crafted a deeply grounded work that speaks fluently across centuries and continents. In an age when traditional music often risks being either sanitized for mass consumption or fossilized for purists, A Ccu Apparteni dares to exist in the restless, painful space between memory and reinvention. Using a fascinating set of traditional instruments, friscaletti, marranzani, zampogne, woven with the subtle hum and drones of electronics, she creates music that is at once ancient and urgently contemporary.

Indeed, the opening strains immediately transport the listener into an enveloping space where ancestral voices echo against the beat of exile. Yet, just when one might expect the project to veer into romanticism, Gulisano and her collaborators, notably Cesare Basile and Giorgio Maltese, deftly steer the music toward rawer, more unsettled terrain. The Sicilian dialect emerges here as an unflinching medium through which poverty, loneliness, scorn, and hope are named without embellishment.

Throughout the album, the question posed by the title, A Ccu Apparteni? (“To whom do you belong?”), reverberates not only as a cultural inquiry but also as an existential one. As someone who has spent long periods navigating the thin spaces between cultures, at home everywhere and nowhere, I found myself deeply moved by the way Gulisano treats belonging not as a fixed state but as a fragile, lived experience. In her voice, you hear the grief of dislocation and the fierce pride of those who, although exiled from the soil of their birth, refuse to relinquish their inner compass.

Moreover, it is crucial to understand the historical weight behind the musical choices made here. Sicily, a land shaped by successive waves of colonization and migration, bears in its music the scars and the splendors of displacement. The friscalettu and marranzanu are survivors’ tools, instruments of persistence in a place where survival itself has long been an act of defiance. Gulisano, acutely aware of this, lets them speak in their original roughness, cracked, buzzing, breathing.

Equally important is the collaborative spirit that runs through the recording. Basile’s jagged guitar lines and electronics create fractures in the music’s surface, evoking the ruptures of migration. Meanwhile, Maltese’s flutes and bagpipes stitch together fleeting moments of rootedness. Together, they animate a space where tradition is neither sacred nor obsolete, but agonizingly alive.

In the end, Gulisano gifts us a beautifully unfinished map of yearning, stitched together with the stubborn threads of voice, drum, and reed. Through her music, she reminds us that even in our solitude, even across oceans and generations, we are never wholly alone. We belong, fractured, proud, searching, to one another.

Musicians: on vocals, frame drums, keyboards, castanets; on guitars, electronics, baklamas, triangle, ngoni, percussion; and on cane flutes, frame drums, mandolin, jaws harp, bagpipes, accordion.

A ccu apparteni was recorded in October 2022. Arrangements and recording director: Cesare Basile.

Mixing by Gabriele Ponticiello. Mastering by Matteo Nolli at Studio Nos.

Photos by Antonio Triolo. Graphics by Orazio Sturniolo.

Produced by Roberta Gulisano & Orazio Sturniolo.

Buy A Ccu Apparteni.