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‘WWhat should I do now that I don’t have my mother anymore?” Today Today sing on Com’haiu to Farithe first single from their self-titled album. “If I had my mother, I wouldn’t love you.” What may sound like an honest self-reading that the modern composer has come out of the medical fields is actually a traditional Sicilian story sung by a bather, reimagined here through three Sicilian voices. Holy Week polyphony. For Palermo’s group, the loss of women is a metaphor: a symbol of Sicily’s broken culture, which they find through old work songs, carters’ cries and carols, and then recreate them using electronic instruments and small instruments.
In the Italian mind, Sicily has been around longer than the southernmost island of the country. It has functioned as a symbolic South, carrying ideas of old-fashioned beauty and rural authenticity along with associations with poverty, crime and backwardness. His character is often admired and loved at the same time.
Today’s Inception digs deep into popular shows. Formed by singer-songwriter Alessio Bondì, synth player Donato Di Trapani and producer and guitarist Fabio Rizzo, the project grew over the years and included Sicilian recordings of the 20th century, guided by the idea that the Sicilian music presented was only a fraction of what existed before. What survived, they found, was often estranged from the countries that produced it.
In his research, Di Trapani observed that the group began: older musicians are often remembered as rough, obscure people characterized by poverty and shame, while later generations of folk musicians saw themselves as having “uplifted” these traditions, making them a southern genre that they felt could be publicly accepted. On the contrary, his generation “glorified” those traditions, softened and refined them to fit a southern culture that they thought could be openly accepted: the Sicily that would later become famous. Dolce & Gabbanablack lace or Inspector Montalbano books and TV series, where crime takes place between fictional baroque towns, long lunches and seaside resorts.
The line between respect and stereotype continues to cause controversy at shows in southern Italy. A recent flashpoint was To My Countrythe most successful single is three southern artists – Serena Brancale of Puglia and Levante and Delia of Sicily – who combine pop production around it pinches-smooth music and familiar southern imagery: women sitting outside on plastic chairs, empty piazzas, white paper flying over markets. For some listeners, it was a romantic approach to diasporic longing and homecoming; to others, it was a stark sight, giving the South a vivid and nostalgic look.
In contrast, Lero Lero deals with Sicily less as a postcard image than as a complex social and sonic heritage, made up of a kaleidoscope of history and experience. Pa Salinasthey recreate the surreal songs that were once shouted by the salt workers when they were counting their baskets of salt, where the toys, almost useless, gradually pile up until the worker’s hunger, his need and his suffering are revealed: “Last night I went to work in Campanella,” Bondì’s voice flows empty to eat a steady bread, but I am eating slowly. hazelnut shell, to keep my stomach slim.
It’s his light, his breath, his following Hearts and Canna it feels like a sudden release. Built around a a mocking song – literally “the song of anger”, a pastoral style that is ignited by the betrayal of lovers – transforms anger into insult and freedom. Di Trapani remembers playing in Palermo and watching “people standing up and singing as if everyone was freeing themselves from the problems of their lives.”
Much of Lero Lero’s work begins with an in-depth reading of the past, while the singer Bondì carefully writes down words and obscure metaphors. The point is not to reproduce faithfully, but to enter into the reproductive processes of the oral tradition itself: not to bother Bedda ca Cantari A Mia Sintistifor example, it started with the acronym 1955 and marriage mouth harp prison drawing. Lero Lero expanded his pieces by incorporating others Sicilian octavesThe traditional verse of Sicily creates, and transforms it into a great cry of love, isolation and loss of freedom. For Rizzo, that reconstruction method is completely faithful to the oral tradition itself: “We don’t submit to fixed texts,” he says. “We design and make various changes to create something that people in 2026 can relate to.”
Their goal is to create their own words from the source, instead of relying on simple foreign words. Bondí said: “It would be easy to hear Carter’s song and think we can put flamenco in it because that’s how music is. But we know that from these songs, from these songs, we can make new music.”
Rizzo’s “Palermitan” guitar is essential for this project. He modified his instruments to create a microtonal, two-stringed guitar that could follow the dynamics of Sicilian music. Pa Franculinaits warped lines cut between bass-synth and tamburello; on It happened yesterdayit revolves around a melody that makes the song strong and ironic.
The conflict between immersed history and disturbing return is captured in artists Giulia Parlato‘s album artwork, featuring the fictional crocodile of Palermo’s Vucciria market: the creature is said to have arrived in the city from the Nile through the waters of the Papireto, a long-buried river that ran through Palermo, to hide under the market’s fountains before emerging to terrorize children. Just looking a little under some unusual circumstances, it hides as if it had been there; as the words of Lero Lero pull from the archives of Sicily, they sound like a hidden presence, ready to disrupt the polished image of modernity.
