(17 July 2017) Italian in Morocco. The tour of Stefano Saletti & Banda Ikona continues to present live "Soundcity - Sounds from the Borderlands": their last album that was very successful and ended up at the top of World Music World Ranking and the Tenco Prize in 2016. After concerts in June in Portugal at Ponte De Sor, Pombal and Mafra, and their return to Italy from Morocco, where they was very well received in the three dates organised by the Sete Sois Sete Luas Festival (Casablanca, Essaouira, and Ceuta - Spanish enclave). But the concerts do not end there. Stefano Saletti & Banda Ikona are in fact leaving for Hungary to play at Babel Sound Festival on July 19 and Frontignan in France on July 21. Saletti's traveling companions - a multi-instrumentalist who plays the oud, bouzouki, saz baglama, guitar, piano and percussion - are the musicians who for ten years have made up the Ikona Band: Mario Rivera (powerful and creative bassist, leader of Agricantus), Barbara Eramo (Tarantine singer engaged in many international projects of world and popular music), Giovanni Lo Cascio (percussion and drums in Novalia and Agricantus and leader of Aksak Balkan music project). (Red)

WORLD-MEDITERRANEAN FOLK

Saletti has traveled with his music from Lampedusa to Istanbul, from Tangier to Lisbon to Jaffa, Sarajevo and Ventotene, where he recorded sounds, noises, radio, vocals, and sound scapes. From this musical material, he composed a sound fresco about the difficult dialogue between the north and south, the stories of migrants, wealth, hopes and pain that cross the streets of the Mediterranean. In this tale he used the Sabir, the language of the sea, of the ports, of the fishermen and sailors of the Mediterranean, the language of the possible dialogue that unites Italian, French, Spanish and Arabic into a single sound stream. The result is a charming World-Mediterranean folk, miscegenation, a rich mixture of rhythms, melodies, and colors. In April 2016, the album "Soundcity: sounds from the frontier cities" (for Finisterre / distr. by Felmay) who has received awards in Italy and abroad: it was classified in first place in WMCE's World Music Charts Europe for three months, in the Top Ten of the Transglobal Music Charts, album of the month in the magazine FRoots and Blogfolk; in the top five of the prestigious Tenco Prize for the dialect and minority languages category. Saletti and other members of the Ikona Band have been working in Sabir, for years in Italy and abroad, on string techniques and percussion instruments, on vocal techniques, on linguistic contaminations, influences and specificities of the many musical styles of Mediterranean countries.