Heroin In Tahiti

Heroin In Tahiti return with “Sun And Violence”: a mammoth double LP. Source and inspiration of “Sun And Violence” is Italian folklore and the work of ethnomusicologist Diego Carpitella in Southern Italy during the 50s. This time, Heroin In Tahiti abandon the freaked out approach of the previous release, for an almost prog-infused sequence of psychedelic folk dances, spacey tarantellas, twangy guitars, black market hymns and Joe Meek-style homages to the sinking of Costa Concordia. An epic journey into the abyss of Mediterranean psyche, “Sun And Violence” is easily the most ambitious statement from the authors of “Death Surf”.  As Byron Coley put it, talking about their “Peplum” 7 inch: “so inspiring you'll feel like whipping out your camera and making a little movie”. Only this time the movie is huge

" The leap from LP to double LP often dilutes a group’s synergy, thinning moments of chemistry across too vast an expanse. But Rome duo Heroin In Tahiti’s second album not only escapes this fate, it inverts it, extrapolating their sweaty, delirious spaghetti wasteland sound from moody gunslinger vignettes into vivid widescreen tableaux which are more immersive and less predictable than anything else they’ve yet attempted. Part of it is the actual track selection, which is so diverse and dynamic you realise they’ve been hoarding all their best material during the past few years in preparation. But the album’s sequencing, too, deserves mention – it’s rich with narrative, unfurling dramatically like a tattered flag above a remote, dust-choked outpost. The environmental specificity of Sun And Violence echoes the hostile exoticism of Agitation Free’s Malesch and Ensemble Economique’s Psychical, its modal psychedelic structures strewn with fractured samples of crickets, calls to prayer, transistor radios, rain, distant soldiers amassing in ominous formations. Spectral threat hovers like heatwaves on the horizon.

Sun And Violence continues the duo’s fixation on dualities: drugs in paradise, Death Surf (as they titled a 2012 release), a vision of la dolce vita shadowed by dark forces. Valerio Mattioli and Francesco De Figueiredo recorded the album at their home studio, citing Italian folklore as an ongoing inspiration, and the language of their collaboration has rarely achieved such fluency and power. Given extra space to flourish, their guitar motifs twist from twangy accents into serpentine, mystifying currents. The album’s longest song is “Continuous Monument”, a confounding 12 minute, two act track that shifts from radiophonic terrarium to focused percussive frenzy to disembodied raga like a soul passing through plagued regions of purgatory. The sun shines equally on the wicked and the dead." The Wire