NZIRIA - XXYBRID (2022)

NZIRIA, the new experimental project by artist Tullia Benedicta, debuts on Gabber Eleganza’s imprint Never Sleep with a full-length titled XXYBRID.
Recorded during a period of worldwide lockdown, the album represents the artist’s psychomagic act to redeem their Neapolitan origins and to reinterpret some of the topoi of the Neapolitan culture.

NZIRIA integrates the main forms and themes of the Neomelodic song, while regenerating the cis-heteronormative scenario.
Through a powerful and androgynous singing, they reinterpret the stereotyped, almost archetypal stories of the Neomelodic genre, welcoming narratives of the LGBTQI+ community and singing of queer love and mercurial identities.

Through the album, NZIRIA re-appropriates the Neapolitan dialect, which they learnt from their grandparents: the word itself, 'nziria, is an almost untranslatable dialect word, indicating the obstinate and unprovoked tantrum of children when they’re tired.
Neomelodic music, a genre stemming in the mid-Seventies, became a distinctive sound of Southern Italy with the voices of artists such as Nino D’Angelo and Gigi D’Alessio. Being intrinsically linked to illegal practices of divulgation, this genre narrates social collapses and emotional possessivity through hyper-sentimental lyrics and lightweight pop atmospheres, mostly enacting standardised and discriminative patterns.

Hard Neomelodic is the term chosen by the artist to describe their quest, generating a sonic space in which disruptive tonalities such as those of the Neomelodic and Hardcore are combined to celebrate hybridity as an arena for unrestricted self-determination.

As a non-binary artist, NZIRIA draws from their experience to tackle borderless concepts such as those of otherness, diversity and inclusivity. Their quest in metamorphosing heteronormative and discriminative narratives of Neomelodic applies to the restless battle against genre
discriminations, often rooted in Western society.
NZIRIA coats the vivid Neapolitan realm populated by pagan symbols, theatrical characters, chimerical figures such as that of the Femminiello, sacred effigies, hyperbolic beliefs with sophisticated sonic avant-garde, inspired by the Hardcore Gabber, Trance and Italodance 2000 tonalities which characterised their adolescent clubbing experience in Ravenna.

“I tried to encapsulate in this record that small symbolic universe which, for me at least, is Neapolitan culture. Some of these images are reminiscences of my childhood, while others are things I discovered a lot later, when I decided to look back at my origins and embrace them with
pride. I chose to include references to history, beliefs, traditions, to celebrate the Tarantella in a different but somehow related key, and to start the record with a magical figure, the Femminiello, because I wanted this album to be like that: hybrid, mysterious and lucky."