If you find yourself suffering from a deadly spider’s bite and need to dance it off, we have the perfect TD Sunfest band for you! Kalàscima is one of Italy’s hottest and most innovative ensembles, meshing the traditional dance music known as Taranta and the corresponding ancient ritual of pizzica tarantata with global styles like Balkan, klezmer, Celtic and electronica. It six members – musicians in some of Europe’s finest orchestras such as L’Orchestra Popolare La Notte della Taranta – are friends from Salento (in the southern Italian sub-peninsula of Apulia) who grew up together playing and singing their region’s hypnotic melodies and rhythms and have since reinvented this tradition with a mix of electronics, lysergic beats, original melodies and folk atmospheres. When ancient meets modern, the result is explosive, generating a potent form of trance.
Kalàscima features many fascinating traditional instruments (bagpipe, traditional flutes, Italian organetto), a spectacular array of percussion from southern Italy and beyond (riqq, darbuka etc.), modern instruments such as the bass guitar and loop machine, and thrilling vocals. The band has a large international fan base across Australia, Canada, USA, Ecuador, China, South Korea, India, Japan, Europe and elsewhere.
K, released in October of 2018, is Kalàscima’s most recent (third) album and a follow-up to 2014’s Psychedelic Trance Tarantella, which catapulted the band onto the international stage and was nominated for several prestigious awards, including a Premio Tenco.