Various Artists - Tod Trauer Trapani (2005)

Year: 2005
Style: funeral marches, brass music, field recordings
Country: Italy (Sicily)
Format: MP3
Quality: CBR 256 kbps
Size: 130 MB (5% recovery information + artwork included)

Funeral marches played by local "banda" (brass) bands, recorded during the traditional Holy Friday Procession (Processione dei Misteri) on the streets of Trapani, Sicily. According to a review, this is a source that inspired Ennio Morricone as well as Nino Rota. Track 8 indeed contains the funeral music from Fellini's "Amarcord", while another one features Chopin's famous march.

Tod Trauer Trapani (2005)
Edition Grumbach, Bern (CD, no catalogue number)

(Untitled) tracks 1-12
63:13 min

Compiled by Ben Jeger and Clemens Klopfenstein, "Death Sorrow Trapani" (as which the title translates) neither contains liner notes nor further informations about the recordings.
Please don't expect any high speed Balkan brass music. Compared to that style, the music here is slow and rather stately. It could be even called "ambient", as the recordings of those rather clumsy and amateurish but deeply heart-felt playing brass formations include streets and audience noise — which definitively adds to the charm.
A short remark calls it also "the sound report of a night: a movie without images". Actually a Swiss movie theatre once really performed that CD without any visual acompaniement... Cinema for your ears, mingling the sacral and the secular in a peculiar, sometimes even funny way.

The "Processione dei Misteri"

For over four hundreds years every Holy Friday the tradition of the Procession of the collection of Sacred Saints of Via Crucis, known as “I Misteri” is repeated. The Procession involves a two kilometre journey in which thousands of local citizens and tourists coming from all over the world participate. The “Misteri” are a collection of twenty sculptures made of canvas, wood and glue that represent the phases of the Passion and the Death of Jesus. The statues, which stand on a wooden base, are decorated with silver jewellery and floral decorations and they are carried on the shoulders of men who transport them on the journey in the characteristic “annacata” way, a movement which the carriers stamp out to the music of the bands. The statues were designed between the XVII century and the XVIII century by local artists and they are characterised by the deep expressiveness of their faces and for the precision of their engravings. They are conserved throughout the year in the Chiesa del Purgatorio from which they emerge at 2:00 p.m. every Holy Friday, and once the Procession is over on Holy Saturday the following morning, they are returned to the church. On the day of the Procession, Trapani is transformed into a mixture of sacredness and folklore, and the town has maintained these unchanged characteristics for centuries.

(comune.trapani.it)

Processione dei Misteri @ YouTube: sample 1 | sample 2 | sample 3 | sample 4