Hugo Race
The Merola Matrix

Dear friends, "the world changes. But it doesn't change. Because it's a wheel that turns."

Hugo Race comes from afar. Musician and producer (he owns Helixed) for about thirty years, he was born in Melbourne, Australia. He began playing around the world at a very young age. In 1982, he formed his first band, Plays With Marionettes. In 1983, after being an integral part of the Birthday Party during the band's final months, he was among the founding members of the Bad Seeds. With Nick Cave and the bad seeds, he participated in the recordings of "From Her to Eternity" and collaborated occasionally, on record and live, until the recordings of "Murder Ballads." In the meantime, he set up and dissolved his band in Australia, The Wreckery. Then he moved to Europe, where, with the "ever-changing collective" True Spirit, he still releases records under the name Hugo Race & the True Spirit. The latest album, "53rd State," was released last June (Glitterhouse Records).

Over the years, he boasts collaborations with, among others, Mick Harvey, Nikki Sudden (and The Jacobites), Marta Collica (with whom he shares the Sepiatone project), Cesare Basile, Manuel Agnelli, and Afterhours. He also worked on the soundtrack for Richard Lowenstein's "Dogs in Space," John Hillcoat's "Ghosts... of the Civil Dead" (the one from "The Proposition"), and Michael Rymer's "The Queen of the Damned."

Hugo Race is a citizen of the world. He's traveled the planet far and wide, and for years he's lived more or less permanently in Europe. But only in Sicily, between the end of the nineties and the early new millennium, did he discover what "real music" is.
One evening, while at Palazzo Ramacca (Palermo) working on sound installations. "Sound sculptures" created by mixing sounds taken from the radio, audio tapes, and compact discs. Palazzo Ramacca is in Vucciria, a historic popular district in the center and home to the market immortalized by the great Renato Guttuso in 1974, and when the sound spreads around, a group of local boys, many of whom work in the "carnezzeria", approach Hugo and ask him to change the music. That's how Hugo Race comes into possession of a bunch of pirated audio cassettes from the ‘70s.
Hugo inserts a tape into the player and is immediately deeply struck by "that voice, by that hyper-dramatic orchestration and the Neapolitan melodies with a Middle Eastern aftertaste." It's the turning point. He has discovered the "real music": the tapes contain original versions of Mario Merola's songs. Hugo starts mixing Merola with what he was playing. He likes the result. He feels that what he's doing has a strong connection with his story in southern Italy. He decides to go all the way with the matter and to make an album out of it.

An album, "The Merola Matrix," which was recorded at the "Zo contemporary culture center" in Catania in 2004. Hugo gets hold of pirated cassettes, vinyl, videos, and recordings of Mario Merola's films. Then he mixes, reshuffles, recycles, copies and pastes, cuts. He combines Merola's voice with songs from the Neapolitan and Sicilian tradition with electronic sequences and loops. It plays. The result is a post-modern reinterpretation, at times inevitably ironic, but above all enthusiastic, of an important snapshot of southern Italy's popular culture: the sceneggiata from the seventies to the mid-eighties.
But "The Merola Matrix" is not just meant to be a reinterpretation of that era's popular culture set to music and video by Mario Merola's films. "The Merola Matrix" is a true soundtrack. "The Merola Matrix" is the soundtrack of a film that wasn't written, or born from a director's mind, but from history. For better or worse. Because here in the south, "we too, little by little, die together with the land."

"The Merola Matrix" is an audiovisual project. I had the chance to view the video contents of the project at the PAN (Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli) one summer a few years ago. I think it was 2005. On that occasion, Hugo Race was playing for the preview of the next edition of the Neapolis Festival. On the screen, there were alternating film sequences from Mario Merola's movies. Among them, I particularly remember the memorable sequence at the port of Naples - which Saviano has called a "sea's anus" - where Merola bids farewell and embraces a young Nino D'Angelo who tried hard to guide him on the right path. I believe the film is "Tradimento." But it hardly matters, as I wouldn't recommend it to you anyway.

Instead, the album, beware!, listen to it. Or meet a bad end. Zan zan!