Digipack CD. The second LP in Black Sweat’s latest batch, ‘I Tarantolati’ the first outing of Antonio Infantino with his band, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, while very different in its musical approach, belongs to the same wild ferment around Folk Studio in Rome, and was issued by the Folkstudio label the year prior in 1975.

Antonio Infantino was poet and singer, who operated in circles connected to Beat literature and Italian performance and gestural music circles, alongside figures like Sylvano Bussotti, Giuseppe Chiari and Alvin Curran, among others. During his childhood in Matera, he developed a deep attachment to the rural way of life and the sounds that sprang from it, leading him to develop a very specific brand of ethno-folk music connected to his study of the mysterious phenomenon of Tarantism, a form of hysterical behaviour originating in Souther Italy that is thought to be connected to spider bites, and for which dancing is considered to be the only cure, which gave way to specific cultural traditions in Basilicata, Apulia, Sicily.

Interpreting the folk legacies of Tarantism in radically forward-thinking ways, “I Tarantolati” encounters Antonio Infantino and his group, Il Gruppo Di Tricarico, reinvents the traditional repertoire of Basilicata, creating an entirely new and original songbook. Comprising nine astounding compositions, the album delves into a trance inducing form of chanting folk, driven by rhythms on stemmed guitar and diverse percussion, often underscored by hypnotic drones that calls forth images of the ancient world within a decidedly avant-garde meets the psychedelic sound.

An absolute stunner - deep and universally human - the combines revolutionary music, folk, and frenetic drumming to produce something entirely singular in the history of Italian music, Antonio Infantino Ed Il Gruppo Di Tricarico's “I Tarantolati” is absolute gold from the first soundings to that last. Truly amazing and not to be missed.