From the Arabic Nuwwar, “flower, bud,” which passed into Sicilian as Nuàra through the Latin Nohara with the meaning of “garden,” comes the name of the project shared by three Sicilian musicians: Michele Piccione (ethnomusicologist and multi-instrumentalist), Federico Pipia (electronic musician and producer, also known under the alias Pipya), and Gabriele Bazza (guitarist and singer specialized in traditional vocal techniques).

The Nuhara project aims to “regenerate” ancient songs and music of the Sicilian oral tradition, documented in the field by various scholars and ethnomusicologists starting in the 1950s. Drawing from a selection of archival materials, the trio offers a work of rewriting that hybridizes a philological approach with electronic and electroacoustic arrangements, featuring sounds drawn both from the contemporary IDM and dance scene and from examples of avant-garde music of recent decades.

Through this process, the pieces are resemanticized within a new expressive framework, creating a bridge between an archaic world now lost and a contemporaneity that cannot stop nourishing itself from that past.
Nuhara creates a space of musical and anthropological dialogue: through the use of electronic music, various traditional instruments of the Sicilian-Mediterranean area, and traditional performance techniques. The sounds that once narrated the lived experience of a Sicily consigned to History are reborn like a sprout:, a heteromorphic fruit that takes on a new form from the seed that generated it.

This artistic research has been made possible thanks to the collaboration with Sergio Bonanzinga (full professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Palermo), who made available essential sound documents and films to substantiate this project.