Marsab - Officina Zoe

Energetic, trance dance, tambourine inspired euphoria, meant to heal the pysche. It’s close to 2:30 am and the open field is still thick with rondos forming spontaneously in a crowd of 50,000. The final concert of La Notte Della Taranta has just ended and a courtship begins in one of these cirlces between a woman and her partner– the pizzica del core – calling to each other with their arms he comes to dance around her - she takes out a handkerchief and a flash of material becomes her voice – they move closer together, feet in constant motion lifted by the music - she’s watching him with her eyes.
Most of these people will be here until dawn. This is the intensity of pizzica tarantata.
From the end of June to September, residents of Grecia Salentina, a region in the heart of Puglia, transcend ordinary life with night after night of sagras & festivals all based on rituals over 500 years old.
The name derives from the tarantula, a spider, whose “pizzica” or bite provoked severe reactions for the women who came into contact with them while working in the tobacco fields. Being bitten meant becoming tarantata - or afflicted - and also provided a way to rebel against the oppressive rules of society.
Musicians were called in by the families to bring their organetto diatonico, guitar, violin and tamburello to provide the only cure. They created up to 8 different pizzicas by listening and responding to the reactions of the woman who, entranced by the rythmns danced and cried out for days and days until finally all the venom was released. The Catholc church spirtiualized the ritual by adding St. Paul as patron saint in the 16th century. Even later, the music was adapted for courting rites.
In Corigliano tonight musicians call out to the people “Ballate - Dance”. They start in with the pizzica pizzica - more rigourous than other types - within moments a 10 year old in the audience is playing along with the wisdom of his grandfather beating out accents using his hands, legs, head - onstage the barefoot tamburellistas work their hands violently leaving stains of blood on the goat skin of the tamburello - when they achieve that precise 6/8 abbastanza mosso tempo - the people are magically moved to dance.
Lamberto Probo of the group Officina Zoè and has been playing the tamburello for the past 12 years, and crafts his own by hand from local foggia and cherry wood. When he plays pizzica he ceases to exist and something else comes out - there’s a sense of peace for him. Fellow musicians Cinzia Marzo & Donatello Pisanello call out the Spanish, Turkish and Greek influences in the music to create new pizzicas. While maintaining a deep respect for tradition, Zoè have been instrumental in helping to spark a revival now dubbed Neopizzica.
It’s spreading with such passion among the youth that its making its way into dance clubs all over Europe. Gaining strength as an anthem for anti globalization - it puts the rebellious spirit of the tarantatas into a modern context. Artists like Nidi D’Arac and DJ San Francisc’ are mixing the original base rythmn with house, electronica and even jazz beats - all with the intent to share this healing experience. The roots of pizzica seem to be strong enough to handle these changes, maybe because it's also a way of life.
I’ve been here for 8 days now and feel the powerful energy this music gives - a cure even today for the bite of life.
CBC’s GLOBAL VILLAGE - CBC RADIO ONE - 99.1FM - CANADA - SALENTO: reportage by ÓTeresa Montanino. AIRED OCTOBER 18, 2003

"Salento like Santeria or Candomblé, Officina Zoè like Obsession and Possession Liturgy. Sangue Vivo that pulses and drips by each drop of sweat... The concert is more a ceremony, than a musical session. Captured by a dionysiac fury, musicians are literally covered by the public, which get loose under the stage and upon the rhythm of taranta Pizzica... The public will have rhythm and the roman club seems unfit for containing the energy wandering across the air. But any closed ambient could be the same. This is music for threshing floor, for farm, for square, for open space. No definition, but “sangue vivo”, could explain completely the stream of energy that the group is good at emitting into the live set."
Paolo De Bernardin – Musica di Repubblica

What immediately strikes one in this album are the fast tracks where the pizzica explodes in its absorbing hypnotic expression, mostly due to the rhythmic crescendo dictated by the frenetic percussion of the tambourines. A frenzy that induces dance and obsessive movement, so much so that it was used in the past as a trance vehicle or even as a therapeutical source.
Jam - Sept. 2000 Roberto Caselli

The sound track from the homonymous film by Edoardo Winspeare seems oozed out, returned by the wall of the large Salento farm where it was recorded. It is composed of love songs and pizziche tarantate, traditional tracks extracted from the silence of these fields and new compositions swallowed up by the vortex, introduced to the circular breathing (or in blood circulation) of folk culture of the Grecia Salentina. Lamberto Probo and Pino Zimba's vital "beat", Cinzia Marzo and Raffaella Aprile's penetrating vocal lines, barrel organs, castanets, violins, flutes and guitars that wind up and explode in a magical music, that eliminates toxins through exhaustion.
ALIAS (Manifesto) 29th of July 2000 MARCO BOCCITTO

Since 1993 Officina Zoé has one of the groups to propose with most strength the musical traditions of the Salento area, especially the pizzica, that is the ancestral rhythm of Salento soul: exciting and touching, therapeutic and hilarious, one of the stronger elements in the musical rebirth of the whole of Southern Italy.
Musica (Repubblica) 06-07-2000 Felice Liperi

Folk matrix, basically, but energy and a very "rock" based instinct, as used to happend - in respect to music from Naples - with some brilliant works in the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare in the '70. It's an unusual record but stimulating, that deserves the attention of a wider public than the usual followers of the Pizzica tradition.
Il Mucchio Selvaggio - n. 408 Federico Guglielmi

Archaic atmospheres and folk songs melt in an excellent artistic contamination, proposing its own ancient rhythms as a musical reflection of our modernity, transforming a film inspired to today's reality on the border of Puglia into a sort of Pulp Fiction of the South.
Time Out

Just as the Black Death subsided, after killing nearly half the population of Europe, in 1374 another bizarre epidemic struck, "From Italy it spread to... Prussia, and one morning, without warning, the streets were filled... They danced together ceaselessly, for hours or days... they contorted their bodies, writhing, screaming and jumping in a mad frenzy..." Accounts like this one from Benjamin Gordon's Medieval and Renaissance Medicine were recorded across central and northern Europe. Remarkably, in southern Italy, a regional variation of this phenomenon exists to this day. It is known as tarantism, connected to both the province of Taranto and a spider indigenous to that region, the infamous tarantula.
An episode of tarantism recorded just before World War II could be taken from the writings of the Middle Ages. "During the crop season, when the work in the country is very hard, some workers, mostly women, would fall in a state of profound depression apparently after the bite of a local spider, the tarantula... They would be impaired to the point of not being able to work. The family would then call a group of three or four musicians that would cure the patient by playing various tunes (the tarantella). They would try again and again, until the patient (in bed) would react by starting to dance to the tune. This was the right tune for the cure and would follow the dance for many hours if not days. At the end, the patient would collapse and after a long sleep find herself cured."
This music and its dances of tarantism are from the roots of Mediterranean Europe, and ZOE's recent release on CNT, titled Sangue Vivo (translated Life's Blood), is devoted to its perpetuity. Their contemporary recordings and performances are the result of their long and in-depth research into the traditional, popular music of their homeland, Salento. ZOE describe their music in very spiritual terms—as the sum of the rhythms of human breath and heart, as the actual beat of the earth. Dancing to this music becomes a therapeutic rite.
It is hard to convey this feeling in words, but it is difficult if not impossible, to remain indifferent when you hear this music, because the high energy and persistent crescendo of the tambourine beats "goes straight to the heart", as the band members themselves claim. Their philosophy is, "If the young black people from the urban ghettos narrate, with the help of rap, the poverty and the rage, the Salentians, from time immemorial, express their feelings and passions by beating the tambourine and by dancing the 'pizzica' until they fall into a trance."
Pizzica is the word for the deadly sting of the tarantula, and it is also the name of the frenzied dance to dispel the sting of the spider. The tambourine used in this music is called pizzica, or "sting" (to beat on the pizzica or sting), and finally the word pizzica is used to refer to the fast, swirling 6/8 time dance for couples hearing this music. It's frantic dancing-it's from another world, yet still a very human one. It's not just for expression; it's for communication and even used for courting.
ZOE claims that they have found many of the melodies for their songs not just from the past, but from their unconscious memory. Songs are derived from both legend and the painful history of the region. From an ancient legend from the time of the Crusades, the song "Tuppi Tuppi-Toc Toc" tells the story of a captain who returns home after being away far too long. His wife doesn't recognize him when he knocks on her door, yet she is very open to his embrace.

Who are you good captain?
I will come open the door for you
and the beauty arises, arises in her nightgown
Oh tell me my beauty where has your husband gone?
My husband has gone to war and I hope he never returns
The sword he wears on his belt may pierce him
and the rivers with their waters may drown him
say, say beautiful woman, you want so much harm for your husband?
and his gaze reminded her and he seemed to be her husband
Who are you!? My husband! I will beg your forgiveness
quiet quiet beauty for you will be pardoned
to 'france' he took her, but dressed in red
in a moment he unsheathed his sabre and cut off her head...

Abandonment is also the theme of "L'America". This song recalls the heartache of the region at the beginning of the (last) century, when the finest local men emigrated to America, the Promised Land. They were sons and husbands, who, once gone, were never heard from again. Abandoning their homes and their women, they also apparently abandoned their identities in the New World.

Perhaps he has found an American
if he has found an American
I have found oh Mary my fate
I have found a countryman
America is not called America anymore
It is called the Ruin Oh Mary my fate
It is called the Ruin of home.

Abandonment, heartache, death, and their opposites—a jubilation of life, nature, all the mysteriousness of Salentian cultural history comes together on ZOE's Sangue Vivo. Songs from this recording were also used for the soundtrack of a film, with the same name, by Edoardo Winspeare. It was the only Italian film selected by the Sundance Film Festival in 2001.Not since the mid-'70s, the heyday of disco, has "dance music" gotten so much media attention, and deservedly so. But "dance music" is by no means an invention of the technological age. The need to completely abandon oneself to the rhythm of the beat is human nature. And, historically, we can see that this need rises after great crises in society. For those who may still be horrified by recent events in the world today, the songs and dances of Salento offer an age old remedy. As one of the songs, "Enchantment", poignantly points out that it's the same old story.

Two thousand years have passed
man, unconscious, has warped them
He sold his heart and soul
before gold and power
The moment has arrived
I don't want to hear anymore lies.