ABOUT THE BAND
SACROMUD: THE OVERGROUND BLUES; ABOVE THE UNDERGROUND, UNDER THE MAINSTREAM
A NEW MUSICAL “CROSSROAD” BETWEEN HUMAN RIGHTS, MISSISSIPPI, GUBBIO AND SOCIAL INCLUSION!
«Maybe, to continue the journey, instead of selling our soul to the devil like Robert Johnson, we must accept the hell, and - as Italo Calvino says - become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and lean to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, then make them endure, give them space».
This is how Maurizio Pugno, leader and founder of the Sacromud collective, comments the end of «Gubbio to Memphis», the documentary made between Italy and the South of the Mississippi.
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​The SACROMUD overground music feels that, in the new popular culture, there is still that old wandering spirit in search of lay prayers; therefore it tries to play the sound of their footsteps, the rhythm of new exodus, to give voice to the sensuality of human weaknesses and to the blackening of the trees, with its off-scale blues, in this new Carousel.
It’s not just a band that catch into Maurizio Pugno's blues, continuing in some way the trajectory traced with over 40 years of activity around the world, but it is a real factory of suggestions and sounds spread on what we are today, the Sacred Mud of the contemporary.
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The Sacromud Live Show follows this vision and is built as a single musical suite within which the narration itself moves as well as soul, roots music, blues, rock, pop, funk, and R&B but blended together with the sounds of contemporary contradictions.
The OVERGROUND SUITE is the answer that Sacromud tries to give to those who allow themselves, sometimes even unwittingly, to be seduced by the tradition that feeds the sound of contemporary sacred mud, that tradition, which belongs to everyone, even to those who do not know the rhetoric that distinguishes its profile.
The overground blues proves to be the sum, of the values ​​useful to his people and that people must continually renew itself, if it does not want to perish.
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But it is also a stroll around Bluesland, the land where everyone has generated the music of the last 150 years :
«the blues was for me the salt with which I seasoned my musical journey – says Pugno himself - not only as a musician but above all as an enthusiast. Sacromud is what I call an emotional "slingshot" rather than a musical group that has transformed my path into an experimental synthesis at times difficult, with which to deal but from which to draw ideas: means but a burning desire to break objects to give soul to the matter. Raffo has translated all the contradictions of turning on oneself through, as I often repeat, his sacred mud but each one of us is dirtying the music that is written with his personal history.
A summary of the society I would like: different languages that enrich a synthesis that seeks another».
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The need to represent human weaknesses has transformed Maurizio Pugno since his debut in 1982, into a musician who plays the blues, the music that comes closest to the stories of everyday life and, within this journey «against the flow», he decides to root his experience within his new daily life, geographically, musically and humanly.
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The «bourgeois tribality» of Raffaele «Raffo» Barbi, scoops up with both hands in the puddle of our daily and contradictory battles, fitting perfectly with the new vision that Pugno is trying to give to his music, rooted in the blues but mirrored in the 21st century!
Pugno's so-called guitar lyricism fits perfectly with Raffo Barbi's warm and biting vocalism. «What intrigued me first of all, was his deep emotionality - says Pugno - hidden by that serious, dark, and silent way of acting. The first time he sang Leon Russell's Help Me Thro 'The Day I heard in Raffo salt, mud and respect; the salt of passion, the mud of life and respect for listening».
Franz Piombino (bass) is the other senior member of the band. Born in Turin Italy in 1968, he has been part of Pugno's musical history for many years now. Back in homeland after having lived as a professional musician for about twenty years in London, he played with many artists of the blues/soul scene now he is the eclectic bass player of Sacromud as well as of other Labilia productions of which he's one of the supporting pillars.
To the two seniors members, Pugno has given the support of two other musicians coming from different musical backgrounds and who have step by step appeared in the world of Blues and Soul: Alex Fiorucci on organ, piano and synthesizers and Riccardo Fiorucci on drums.
«Resized», (released on 2021), is a readjustment of the dress (like a good tailor would do) to their own sizes: eight re-adapted covers, and three originals composed and recorded for this album.
«Resized» is the raft that finally ferried the band towards SACROMUD and «Sacromud», the album out in 2022 completely composed by Maurizio Pugno and Raffo Barbi, is totally immersed in this suggestion.
After the two studio albums and having been awarded as «Best Italian Album 2023» and «Best Italian Rock Band of 2023» within the event called «Rock Targato Italia» organized by Radio ADMR with the collaboration of the specialized magazines Mescalina and Buscadero, Sacromud win the final of the Italian Blues Challenge and fly to Mississippi and Memphis, to represent Italy at the INTERNATIONAL BLUES CHALLENGE 2024.
A kind of «revolution»: a band so musically contaminated and «anthropologically» transversal, represented Italy in the land of Mississippi, the home of Blues, Soul and R&B.
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The band, with a video crew in tow, extended its stay in Mississippi in an attempt to generate a documentary within a new vision regarding finding a common thread between «what we are and what we have loved».
In addition to the documentary, the operation generated the publication of two albums, both children of this production that we can define as «the trilogy of a journey».
The first, released on December 30, 2024, is the double Live album called «Gubbio to Memphis – Live At Opera House; The Overground Suite».
The second, «The SUN Experience» is the result of the recording session, completely analog, at the legendary SUN RECORDS studio in Memphis.
These are Sacromud as they have never been before, stripped down but enriched by the Cape Horns, a horn section arranged by Pugno; a sound that will project them from Sam Philips Avenue a few blocks away, to East McLemore Avenue, towards STAX and «Soulville»!
Five musicians, five ways of seeing and hearing music all projected to achieve a performance designed as a real musical suite of over one and a half hours!
You catch your breath at the beginning and slowly exhale everything!
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