Antonio Infantino

The last word. La Ruota della Vita gathers the final recordings of Antonio Infantino, made just months before his death in January 2018 - the closing statement of a musician, poet, architect and performer who spent more than half a century pulling the trance rhythms of Southern Italy out of the folklore archive and back into the present tense.

Born in Sabaudia in 1944 and raised in the peasant culture of Basilicata, Infantino arrived early at the edges of the Italian avant-garde. From 1964 he moved alongside Vittorio Gelmetti, Sylvano Bussotti, Pietro Grossi, Giuseppe Chiari and Alvin Curran, and at the 1965 Gruppo '70 gathering in Florence he performed with Charlotte Moorman in works by John Cage and Nam June Paik. Feltrinelli published his poems with a preface by Fernanda Pivano. He read with Allen Ginsberg, played Rome's Folkstudio and became one of the faces of the Italian Beat underground. Then he turned homeward. With I Tarantolati di Tricarico he rebuilt the repertoire of Lucanian tarantism into a songbook of his own, culminating in records like Follie del Divino Spirito Santo (Cetra, 1978), where the cupo cupo, the beaten guitar and the frame drum carried lullabies, festival songs and bitter verses about emigration and unemployment.

La Ruota della Vita returns to that source at the very end. Twenty-one tracks, recorded live, with no overdubs and no post-production. Nothing has been smoothed. The voice is older, grainier, closer to the microphone, and the rhythm does what it always did in Infantino's hands: it circles, presses, refuses to stop. Traditional instruments lock into the pulse while the voice drifts between incantation, recitation and song. You hear the room, the breath between phrases, the small shifts of tempo that only happen when people play together in real time.

The title fits. Tarantism was a ritual of the wheel - a dance that went round and round until the afflicted body was released, the cure that Ernesto de Martino documented in Salento in the late 1950s. Infantino understood the tarantella as circular music, and his own life traced a similar orbit: from the Matera of his childhood to the Belgian Royal Academy, which awarded him an honorary degree in 1991, to the European Parliament's Danza Cosmica retrospective in 1996 and the TARA'n'TRANCE event staged in the gardens of the Venice Biennale in 2003, and back again to the voice and the drum.

For those who know the Tarantolati records, this is the coda. For those who don't, it is a direct way in: an old shaman of the Meridione, unadorned, still turning the wheel.