Camera a Sud

Three years after, came Camera a sud, an album that outlines Capossela’s musical dimension. He’s ironical, and he’s been able to put his irony in his lyrics, in the way he sings. He defines this record “balcanic”, due to his recent love for balcanic music, and in fact Capossela wanted the album to sound “open”, in opposition to the closed atmosphere of jazz. You can hear the echoes of traditional and popular music in songs like Zampanò, not totally inspired by Federico Fellini, but hopefully you can hear chickens, ducks, hanging in mud and dust. That’s a really rural image turned into music. That’s why Camera a sud is considered an album “to be read”, and not only to be listened to, since it contains many literary experiments and references – like Corso, Fante, Ginsberg or the Italian Tondelli, but also the stories that Capossela tells. 

But there aren’t only popular music and literature in Camera a sud: you can definitely recognize the songwriter’s love for South American sounds: he claims to be a “son of tango”, he admires Roberto Goyeneche, and he decided to put a lot of this sound in the record. Take for instance Guiro, with all the trumpets and – yes – the guiro, or the title track: listening to them is an immediate trip to Argentina or Brasil, in other words to sud, to southern countries, southern music. Camera a sud is the last song on the tracklist: it sums up the whole album, but it also highlights the spirit of travelling, the sense of loneliness that gets you while looking out of the window of that camera, that room.