On March 1, Karelian-Luxembourgish sound artist and composer Maria Rossi a.k.a. Cucina Povera will play a show at Riga, Latvia’s 1983 bar (Vagonu street 21). Start time: 20:00. Tickets can be purchased at www.ticketservice.lv for 10 EUR; they will cost 15 EUR at the entrance. The event is organized by Skaņu Mežs association for adventurous music in collaboration with the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, co-funded by the EU.
Cucina Povera focuses on the marginal and the observational. The repeated motifs in their work are an uncanny testament to the beauty of banality, a monument infused with the mysticism of everyday life and a love for accessible sound sources like creaky tenement floors, boiling kettles and leaky taps – stories told by means of cheap and rudimentary equipment. Like in the titular practice of peasant cooking, Rossi takes simple ingredients and creates a stylistically resourceful, spontaneous hermeticism that provides a creative respite from the hubbub of the metropole.
Her album “Hilja” was praised by The Quietus as “an irresistible trip into minimalism and silence”.
In an interview to Lucia Udvardyová, Rossi says the following of her Karelian heritage: “When it comes to music and the oral tradition, Karelian songs I have been exposed to are mostly work songs having to do with labour on the land, songs about herding cows, and so on. These songs are often for several voices and they present hypnotic and simple harmonies. They are fairly melancholy songs that seemingly operated in the moment, helping with repetitive aspects of work in communal ways, so it’s all quite pragmatic. This is something I do a lot – create music as a coping mechanism in the midst of the incessant whirl of distractions dealt by death-drive capitalism, the consistently expected free labour from musicians and an accelerating scene that’s no stranger to the odd chancer and some labour exploitation. Aside from that, I don’t consciously appropriate from my own or any other tradition, and just create from a starting point of formative exposure to all kinds of music from the places that I have lived in, as well as communal kinds of music-making, such as church and choir music. “
Cucina Povera is a participating artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and interdisciplinary art, co-funded by the European Union. Skaņu Mežs’ activities within the project are also supported by The Ministry of Culture of Latvia.
https://shapeplatform.eu/artist/cucina-povera/
