The year of Nu Genea – Patrizio Ruviglioni

Massimo Di Lena, on the other hand, is almost in the dark, and jokes that he has just returned from the bar. “And rushing, by the way, explaining that I had this interview. I met a crazy guy who told absurd, interesting stories. In the end, for us Mediterraneans, the bar is a meeting place”. They both have a strong Neapolitan accent, during the conversation they drink two more homemade coffees and roll over a couple of cigarettes. And they enthusiastically talk about their music, complementing each other’s answers.

Not exactly what one would expect from a group like this, which has arrived everywhere in the last year and which could now spare itself, at least in interviews. “At the Meredith Festival the spectators each took off a boot and started moving it in the air during our concert. It seems to be a tradition reserved for what they consider to be the best group of the event”, they say. At that moment, several orders from Australia are arriving on their site: they have made a splash there too.

Nu Genea are, in fact, Lucio Aquilina and Massimo Di Lena, two musicians from Naples who became citizens of the world. They have a history that makes one think of CCCP, because they too, like Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Massimo Zamboni, emigrated to Berlin in search of inspiration, and they came up with a sound that reconnected them to their roots and was original at the same time. For Ferretti and Zamboni we are talking about the eighties, and the result was “pro-Soviet” punk with industrial derivations and feet in the imagination of red Emilia, where the PCI was a religion.

For them instead, after the start in the techno-house minimal and a collaboration with the legendary Nigerian drummer of afrobeat Tony Allen, the turning point came by indulging “what we have inside”, however simple. “If you try to imitate the Chicago DJ, the Chicago DJ will always be better than you,” smiles Di Lena. “And then”, adds Aquilina, “we were moving in an overly codified genre, in which creativity was somehow ‘channeled’ within stakes. We preferred to directly imagine something of our own, that belonged to us more”.

The “thing” in question is a recovery of Neapolitan funk from the seventies and eighties, from neapolitan power by Pino Daniele and James Senese to the forgotten pop that they themselves brought to light by participating in the project Secret Naples, where they went to flea markets in search of dusty, never digitized vinyls. There was a treasure, in those furrows, but nothing new: it’s the digging, the fundamental activity of looking for unknown jobs for a DJ. “And in fact it is an aspect that has remained from the techno period”, they agree. “The other is the idea of ​​movement: each of our pieces makes you dance”.

The first piece of this new path was New Naples (2018), “born from the nostalgia for home we felt in Berlin, however already contaminated with other sounds we like, such as Cuban music”, and which made them cult artists in our country and beyond. “But it was an attempt, we didn’t expect all this success,” explains Aquilina.

Mediterranean bar instead it has broken the banks and made the imaginary wider, even if the lyrics are always in Neapolitan (“his truncated words help us with the meter, it is a dialect that makes the singing more musical”) and the genre of reference it remained the same. A cross, that is, between tradition and current events, funk and electronics “that makes you dance”.

In songs like Marechià e LieutenantIndeed, synthesizers meet classical instruments such as percussion, acoustic guitars, mandolins, choirs. Di Lena and Aquilina work on it together, alone, in the studio; then once the auditions are completed, they have the parts that do not satisfy them play by “real” musicians, who have now become their live band. Except that this time there is the entire Mediterranean, “a place that is a sensation”.

New Naples in fact he was the son of lack, a past feeling with the opportunity to come back often, even if only for concerts. Now, among other things, Aquilina has even moved to Sicily. “We looked around, rather. To define a ‘sea’ music in general, collaborating with artists like Marzouk Mejri, Tunisian, and Célia Kameni, French”. So here are tropical and North African sounds, as well as a personal way of interpreting the models of the past. “Already a song like Two faces it was boogie, but historically the boogie pieces have four words in the text, because they should just make you dance”, comments Di Lena. “We, on the other hand, insert more developed lyrics. The same Marechià it looks funny, but it has a very melancholy lyrics”.

Yet this extraordinary 2022, in which they achieved success all over the world and ended up on the radio and in the charts as an independent group, which does “everything by itself”, is difficult to frame fully even net of all this. Perhaps the key is that, at least in Italy, this summer they represented an alternative to classic pop, both in terms of The sweet life Of Fedez, Tananai e Mara Sattei and both for the pop music turns of it-pop (Tommaso Paradiso, Carl Brave and Noemi, The Representative of Lista) and rap (Shakerando of Rhove).

“In our country we are somewhat homologated, a project like this can work with those looking for diversity”. Obviously, many. “And it has something to do with having started writing ‘classic’ songs, with verses and choruses, at least on the radio”. Abroad, however, there is more competition. Again for Aquilina, one factor is “that we use the voice as a classical instrument, without putting it too much into prominence”. “Most of the foreigners who hear us for the first time”, continues Di Lena, “do not understand the dialect. They think it’s Portuguese, even Turkish. Then, if they go deeper, they discover reality, and that our music has an imaginary with Naples at the center that fascinates them. They almost never perceive us as ‘Italian’, but often as Neapolitans”.

A successful imagery that, among other things, they themselves continue to export: in addition to live activity, in 2022 they made DJ-sets with the records that inspire them, in festivals such as the C2C in Turin they were entrusted the entire artistic direction of a stage and then, for the many who write to him on Instagram asking for advice on where to eat in Naples, they have even prepared a pdf to send as an answer.

And if at the time of New Naples such a band could be included in that great movement which, from Liberato to the TV series, was helping to relaunch the image of the city, now their identity is so great as to detach themselves from that artistic current. “Finally we are ourselves: true and sincere, Neapolitans proud to be,” he says of Lena. “It’s an inner conquest: we play the music we like, and it doesn’t matter if we’re the only ones playing it; as long as it makes us feel good”.

And precisely this “feeling good” is the meaning of their concerts, parties in which they are accompanied by eight musicians, where people sing and dance, which in Italy were among the most attended last summer and in countries such as Norway involved up to 10,000 spectators at a festival, who probably arrived there to listen to something else. They repeat that the nucleus is “the movement”, and in this the evenings in which they limit themselves to playing records are an excellent test to understand which elements to insert once on stage, to create the right atmosphere. It’s an effective, but old-school approach.

“And then, as an engine, there’s listening to new music anyway, the digging”, says Aquilina. Di Lena: “We always find an hour of time to go to the strangest place in the city where we stop on tour. Because it’s an opportunity to have an experience, to meet people, stories. Sometimes the human tends not to interact with the stranger, but musically it inspires you so much. Over time we would like to discover rhythms from all over the world, pick the ones we like, so that our music is increasingly contaminated”. And when it is pointed out to them that, for this reason, their 2022 pop outsider songs have an artisanal soul, Nu Genea smile.