Hysterrae are a new five-piece group featuring four female singers and musicians from Italy and Iran (Cinzia Marzo, Shadi Fathi, Irene Lungo and Silvia Gallone), along with Italian producer Emmanuele Flandoli. They combine Iranian instruments with Italian traditions and electronic productions to create hypnotic, ritualistic compositions that explore themes of femininity, nature and togetherness. Here, all five members talk about how the group came to be and what they were trying to achieve with their debut album.

How did the group come together? How did you all meet?

SHADI FATHI: Even though we’d known each other for a long time and made various collaborations, we began to work as a real group from 2018, when Giorgio Doveri, artistic director of Irregolare Festival, invited us to make a residency and a concert in Salento. The result of the meeting thrilled both us and the audience, so we began to develop a common repertoire, mixing our respective cultural and musical roots. Initially, the project was based exclusively on our acoustic instruments and our voices, then we also involved Emanuele [Flandoli], and we started experimenting with a blend of acoustic and electronic sounds, developing today’s sound of Hysterrae.

Can you explain a little more about the original concept of the band? Why did you choose to combine ‘Hyster’ and ‘terrae’ for the name?

CINZIA MARZO: Music expresses nature, the soul of peoples, nations, feelings... it is a universal language: you don't need to speak the same language to sing and play together. Thirty years of experience in the musical traditions of Salento, of studying tradition and then innovating with Officina Zoé have led me to feel a great responsibility towards this universe. The meeting with Irene, Silvia, Shadi and Emanuele was dazzling, full of ideas and new experiments. Our connection to millenary traditions of respect and veneration for Mother Earth led us naturally to the choice of the name Hysterrae (belly of the earth), and our knowledge of our past has provided us with the tools to delve deeper into our cultural and musical roots, because songs often preserve the history of the people. The Hysterrae logo represents all this, there is an animal similar to an anthropomorphic bee or a spider, both ancient representations of a Goddess.

What can you tell us about the traditional Italian rituals (tammuriata, rondo, pizzica) that create the foundation for many of the songs?

SILVIA GALLONE: We drew on the rituality and circularity of our ancestral, tribal rhythms; fundamental elements linked to nature, life and the feminine. Pick our song ‘Tramontana’, inspired by a tammurriata of the Madonna Avvocata (Campania). It’s the only tammurriata traditionally played by many drums at the same time, making it strong, cathartic, obsessive and hypnotic. Something similar happens in Salento’s ronde di pizzica (circles of musicians, dancers and spectators), where the main instrument is the tambourine with its triplet, lilting and hypnotic rhythm, closely linked to ancient Greece and Dionysian rites. Circularity also creates a link to the Iranian Sufi world, with its daf frame drum, an instrument surrounded by an aura of allegorical and otherworldly legendary beliefs; the circle of daf is considered the symbol of the circle of life.

Was there a natural synergy between the music of Italy and Iran (as well as Afghanistan and Tajikistan) that you found when making this music?

EMANUELE FLANDOLI: Blending the musical traditions of southern Italy and the Persian ones was anything but simple because they are musical systems based on rather different rhythms and harmonies. But precisely for this reason, it was extremely exciting to find meeting points! Sometimes we applied instruments from one tradition to musical forms from the other (for example, the Iranian setar playing a Neapolitan melody at the beginning of ‘Tramontana’). Other times we combined songs from completely different parts of the world which share similar melodic bases. We tried to highlight, also with the electronic production choices, the common elements of ancestral rituality and circularity, and create something at the same time respectful of each tradition but also new and ‘suspended’ outside of space and time. We're seeking, at least in music, a dimension in which people can coexist, without forgetting their roots, but living in harmony with those of others.

The lyrics for the song ‘Ruvida’ deal with violence towards women. Is it possible to talk more about this song and its significance for the group?

IRENE LUNGO: ‘Ruvida’ is a cry of anger and pain, it expresses what a woman can feel when faced with the aggressiveness of the one she loves. There is a very thin line between love and hate, between trust and fear, between freedom and obsessive control. ‘Ruvida’ talks about this limit, about the emotions that overwhelm when the voice becomes ‘scratchy,’ a warning signal that the limit is about to be crossed. In Italy in the last year alone, more than a hundred women were victims of femicide, in Iran in the same period a series of protests against women's living conditions turned into bloody repression by the government. ‘Ruvida’ was written in that period, to testify, to denounce. And it is precisely fear that blocks thought and action, that makes women rigid and still, that makes them victims of violence, unconsciously complicit in a male-dominated system that wants to control women, often seen as items. It was the first totally new song written by Hysterrae, and it could only deal with this theme, in defence of femininity and the generative power that belongs to us, which must be preserved as givers of life.

This is an extended version of a Q&A that originally appeared in the April 2024 (#196) issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

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