Band der Woche: Ilienses

Ilienses – das sind Multi-Instrumentalist und Komponist Mauro Medde und Sängerin Natascia Talloru aus Sardinien. 2018 gegründet, veröffentlicht das Duo 2020 das Debüt-Album Civitates Barbariae, und kürzlich ist die neue Single „Arbèschet“ erschienen. Die Musik von Ilienses ist tief mit der ursprünglichen Volkstradition ihres Heimatlandes verbunden und eine eindrucksvolle Reise durch sardische Mythen und traditionelle Instrumente, die mit modernen Klängen verwoben sind – „ein Versuch, einige historische Ereignisse und einige Verse sardischer Gedichte in Musik zu übersetzen“.

Who is behind Ilienses? How did the project come into being?
Ilienses was born in the center of an island, Sardinia, in the middle earth called Barbagia, from the water sources, trees, words and verses of Sardinian poets and storytellers and from the imposing sweetness of granite rocks, witnesses silent from distant eras and ancient populations who have lived here and have left us traces of their greatness. Behind Ilienses are Mauro Medde and Natascia Talloru, both originally from two towns in Barbagia, Gavoi and Tonara. We are a couple in life, passionate about music, history, popular cultures and the Sardinian language. In Sardinia, poetry is still an intermediary between the ancient and modern world. Sardinian poets are often considered as sages, who, with the oral typical of these peoples of the Mediterranean, narrate events of the present and the past. We are interested in different historical eras but in particular we are fascinated by the Nuragic era, by the forms of Sardinian banditry and by the historical and socio-economic facts that our present also has, of which we still guard riches but burdens. The island’s musical tradition features a series of archaic instruments and each of our small villages has preserved its own peculiarities. In Gavoi, the main instrument of the Carnival celebrations and rites is „Su Tumbarinu“, a drum made of goatskin which is given a fancy name. My father (Mauro) taught me to play it as a child and later to build it. This also happened for Natascia who grew up in Tonara with the singing “a Tenore“ of her father and uncles and with the sound of the „sonaggias“, the bells built by local artisans to identify the flocks of cows, sheep, goats, horses but also intended for pets. Singing „a Tenore“ is a very ancient way of singing that uses deep and guttural vocal techniques through which the verses of the great poets of Sardinia are brought back, invade our ears since childhood and have contributed significantly to finding inspiration for the birth of the musical project. What determines Ilienses is above all the sound, as we say “su sonu”. On the other hand, different populations are also distinguished by their „sonu“, we consider all ethnic groups in the world to be beautiful for their different, archaic, pagan, sometimes bizarre but unique aspects, very often suspended between sacred and profane. We firmly believe in the preservation and evolution of all the traditions of the world so that the spirit of our ancestors lives in us.

How did your band name come about, and what does it mean to you?
Ilienses is the name of the population that lived around 200-300 BC in Sardinia, in the post-Nuragic era, which took refuge in the mountains of Barbagia in the center of the island, to escape and partly defend itself from the invasion of the Romans. It was the Romans who gave the name to this area of the island, „Barbaria“ and later „Barbagia“, the land of the Barbarians, of the „Pelliti“, like the words recited in our song ‚Littos‘, or the peoples who dressed in skins, not Christianized and not Romanized. The natives of the place. We chose this name because these people were brave enough to face the greatness of the Roman army in order to defend their culture and their territory, we are attracted by the historical events and the courage of these peoples.

Can you tell us a few things about the connection between you two and your journey into the music?
It’s a very beautiful but at the same time complicated question. Our music is an attempt to translate some historical events and some verses of Sardinian poems into music that we have perceived and interpreted in a personal way.

If you had to describe your music in terms other than music, what would you say?
We would say that it’s an imaginary journey that attempts a reconnection with our origins, through a reinterpretation of our tradition we try to communicate with our ancestors, keep alive that ‘fil rouge’ that keeps us tied to them. A palpable and intuitive bond also through their historical and archaeological works that can still be appreciated, wrapped in a veil of mystery and magic, throughout Sardinia.

What are you looking for in music?
Let’s suppose that the question refers to the emotional aspects of music, so we could say that when we work, we look first for the setting. The music must really describe what we are feeling in that moment. As if it were a soundtrack of that situation or of that topic we imagined.

What is sound to you?
A natural element to which modern man pays little attention but which, as we have already said, also helps to distinguish ethnic groups through its specific soundscape. This will be different in Sardinia from London, Paris, or Berlin, in a desert, in a forest or in the middle of the ocean. We believe that sound is one of the main components of life, after all, silence in nature does not exist.

What are your first musical memories? When did you first fall in love with sound?
We were born with traditional instruments at home, and we played with them. Through the game we perceived the characteristic sounds of our place and slowly we evolved listening to different music from the world. We can say that we have developed an ear for listening to music through tradition and later with the theoretical and practical study of modern music. In any case, the deepening of traditional musical harmony was an excellent enrichment that allowed us to compare ourselves in a more respectful way to the tradition and ancient instruments of our countries, thus also allowing us to experiment.

Which person, artist or incident inspired you when you first started making music?
We both come from different musical backgrounds and educations. What unites us is certainly traditional music through the tenor singing, the dance and the sound of the instruments of our area but in our growth we have also navigated in different genres, from hard-rock to blues, from ambient to jazz, from metal to grunge, from punk to soul. Our fathers directed us towards traditional music and a love for music in general. From here it all started for both of us.

What impact do your surroundings have on your music?
The environment that surrounds us and in which we live absolutely plays a prevalent role in our music, it’s our main source of inspiration, especially now where the relationship between man and nature is being lost. We have always perceived a call, an invite to go back to the origins, to the most primitive and essential things that have always characterized the life of those who preceded us. In this sense, the grandparents were basic, who worked as a shepherd, a craftsman, a farmer. Their example helped us to better appreciate our environmental context and all that derives from it, its workers and its products, trying to give it the right value.

Where does your inspiration for music come from? Which sort of mood produces the best song?
Perhaps the best inspiration comes from the autumn period. Autumn is our absolute season where the best ideas are born, the nature of the place, the colors, the recollection, the fruits, the heartiness of this season help us in this sense and act as channels towards inspiring higher entities that suggest to us sounds and moods suitable for our type of musical project. Nature is impressive to us and its changes affect our life.

What can you tell us about your new single „Arbèschet“? How does the birth of a new composition happen for you? How does your compositional process work?
The inspiration for a new song can be influenced by many factors, even the change of season can create stimuli for a new composition. Technically our compositional process is based on musical elements extrapolated from Sardinian folk. It can be a melodic or rhythmic fragment or just a vocal melody originating from the songs of Sardinian poets, as we said before. These elements are sometimes deconstructed and repurposed giving it a different ‘outfit’, musically speaking. In the case of „Arbèschet“ we were inspired by the text, and we started from a poem by Luca Sedda, a local poet, which is inspired by a poem in Sardinian „Lòi Lòi“, by the love for a place, by the charm for a time ancient and the beauty of the woods. ‚Lòi Lòi‘ is a toponym of the horizon, real and figurative, of overhanging rocks, holm oaks, holly oak forests climbing freely to the sky.

How does the visual aspect relate and reflect your music?
When we create music, we imagine places and people, and the places themselves, especially those bonded to our history, or specific people, allow us to imagine our music. Visual experiences, for example through travel, meeting a person who has so much to tell, or watching an exhibition or a specific event, are essential for triggering our imagination. Observing reality and the world around us is essential to find the right sounds, emotions and feelings that we translate into music.

What’s next for you? What are you most looking forward to?
We are currently working on the release of other singles that will later be part of the new album. We hope that Ilienses music arrives as much as possible outside of Sardinia to meet new peoples. We believe that our sounds can be connected to different ancestral cultures present all over the world and that our music is a means and a tool to communicate with them, to feel more united and part even more of a single planet, as if we were rich stories of different shades connected to each other in the primordial essence. It would be nice if our music was able to speak in some way with each of you, as if our sounds served to reconnect any person in the world to something primitive, lost in time.

Bandcamp     Facebook     Instagram

 

(1322)