SOUNDTRACK: RACHELE ANDRIOLI-GlobalFEST Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #135/153 (January 13, 2021).
GlobalFEST is an annual event, held in New York City, in which bands from all over the world have an opportunity to showcase their music to an American audience. I’ve never been, and it sounds a little exhausting, but it also sounds really fun.
The Tiny Desk is teaming up with globalFEST this year for a thrilling virtual music festival: Tiny Desk Meets globalFEST. The online fest includes four nights of concerts featuring 16 bands from all over the world.
Given the pandemic’s challenges and the hardening of international borders, NPR Music and globalFEST is moving from the nightclub to your screen of choice and sharing this festival with the world. Each night, we’ll present four artists in intimate settings (often behind desks donning globes), and it’s all hosted by African superstar Angélique Kidjo, who performed at the inaugural edition of globalFEST in 2004.
The third artist of the third night is Rachele Andrioli from Italy. She is (almost) a one-woman band and makes amazing music with her voice and a loop pedal.
Recording from southern Italy, Rachele Andrioli’s performance highlights her mix of old and new, of traditional music and modern technology. Her trance vocals and loop pedals create a sound all her own, mixing music from Italian, Indian, Lebanese, Albanian and Romani cultures and traditions.
She plays three songs. For the first, “Te Spettu” (“I Respect You”) she loops a jaw harp (who would have thought that that could be the basis for a song). Then she loops her voice crooning. She picks up a hand drum that looks like a tambourine (and gets an amazingly robust sound from it). Her vocal style feels Middle Eastern. It’s a really impressive piece of music.
“Pranvera Filloi Me Ardh” (“Spring Started with the Coming”) is in Albanian. As the song starts, her accompanists come out. Redi Hasa picks up a cello and plays a harmonic note (looped) followed by a gentle plucked melody. Then Rocco Negro plays the accordion. The mournful accordion solo sounds very Italian. Hasa plays a mournful melody and she sings gently with them both.
The men leave and it’s just her for “Ederlezi.” She loops her voice singing a single note and then accompaniments herself including a distortion on her voice making it a very deep harmony. She plays another small hand drum which gets an amazing sound.
This is a wonderfully unique set that I really enjoyed.
[READ: January 22, 2021] Snapdragon
For a while, I was reading every single First Second book that was published. Once the pandemic hit, I fell behind and have not really been able to catch up just yet. But S. brought this book home and I thought it looked interesting even before I saw that it was from First Second.
The cover is a little disconcerting. Snapdragon, the girl in the picture, has hair up in pig tails. But with a ghostly deer behind her, the way her har is drawn, it almost looks like some kind of antler (probably not intended). But there’s a lot of things that are confusing in this story at first (and even second and third) glance. I assume that these other decisions are deliberate.
Many of the characters in this story are African-American, including Snapdragon. But her skin coloring is very different from all of the other characters. I don’t think it matters for the story, whether she is or not (until the very end anyhow). But it was very nice to see so many characters of color in the book. In a strangely similar way, a main character, Jacks, I was sure was a man, but indeed, she is not. Snap recognizes her as a woman right away, but I wasn’t sure if that made a difference either. In fact, Jacks’ masculine appearance is important in the story, but I’m not sure if the reader is supposed to think that Jacks is a man as well?
None of that matters, of course, because once you learn the reality, you can just move on.
So just what the heck is this story about?
Snapdragon is a girl (all the women in her family are named after flowers). She’s a little odd and the other kids are happy to let her know that. The only kid who is nice to her is her neighbor Louis. Louis thinks Snap is weird, but Louis is also pretty unconventional. (more…)
