Alessia Tondo

Alessia Tondo
photo by Ilenia Tesoro
photo by Ilenia Tesoro
  • country:Italy
  • region:Apulia
  • label:IPE IPE Music
  • type:Solo
  • gender:female
  • instrumentation:vocal, electronic, percussion, guitar
  • artist posted by:IPE IPE Music

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  • Alessia Tondo (voice, guitar, frame drums, loop machine)

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From childhood in the Mera Menhir group (leaded by her grandmother) to international popularity with the Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino , Alessia Tondo is one of the most significant voices on the Apulian scene. It was launched by Sud Sound System, at the age of thirteen she became the solo voice of the Orchestra of Notte della Taranta (she duetted with all the guests and with the masters such as Mauro Pagani, Goran Bregovic, Giovanni Sollima, Phil Manzanera, Carmen Consoli, Raphael Gualazzi), he has collaborated with the Italian Popular Orchestra of Ambrogio Sparagna, Radiodervish, Michele Lobaccaro, Ludovico Einaudi (for whom he wrote the text of the successful Nuvole Bianche) and Admir Shkurtaj.

Sita is her first solo work with which she finally decides to come out to have her say and give her own "vision" of popular music with original songs, written by his own hand, in which she entrusts her voice to original vocals plots and ballads, all in the Salento dialect to tell more truth about their roots and identity. An interplay of voices, counter-songs and whispers that here and there wink at Brazil, at Drake's intimate songwriting and at the melancholy of certain Tom Waits ballads but which never lose sight of the root from which they come. A precious, intimate but at the same time universal, magical and profound work; one of the rare examples in which popular culture, specifically that of Salento (Southern Italy) from which Alessia Tondo comes, is personalized and transfigured in a visionary key. In Salento Sita is the pomegranate, a precious and elegant fruit that throughout the Mediterranean area is a symbol of good wishes, of meeting and sharing. And so Sita reveals a mysterious and therapeutic face of popular music as a form of exorcism against “bad thoughts”, a cathartic healing ritual that takes place every time through her words and music.

A minimal basic philosophy as Alessia specifies, recalling the need for subtraction and whispering: "Sita had the courage to whisper only because over the years I have listened to records in which the songs have pierced my chest and were absent great vocal virtuosity. The king, for me, in this kind of story was Nick Drake . I don't compare myself in the slightest. Simply his records told me that if I had wanted to say something I could have done it even without raising my voice too much and without necessarily having to demonstrate what technical skills I had acquired over the years ».

A work that, even in the concert, is based on simplicity - only apparent - and on the truth of her wonderful voice accompanied by the guitar, the frame drums and the collaboration of a loop machine that enriches its expressiveness. Original songs, words and music, which take up the ways of tradition and transfigure them into a sort of chamber music that has the elegance of art music and the emotion of popular music. Past and future, tradition and avant-garde, daily and eternal in a daring, enigmatic, revelatory experiment.