Biography

Daniele Sepe is a classical musician dressed down, an indomitable outcast of jazz. She fuses forma canzone, improvisation, orchestral music, tarantella, rap and free jazz from Chicago, hip-hop, anonymous medieval and music hall songs, distilled dirges from Lapland out of the sax of Jan Garbarek, and old recitatives of the Near East. She uses the extra long vibrato of the tammorra and the paroxysms of brass bands. She wears the contorted expression of the Italian comedian Totò and the emphatic grimace of Frank Zappa while citing the poet Tacit, the rapper Zulù, Mayakowski and the mythical master Anepeta, N.a.t.o. and Magna Grecia, the Latin-American rebels, and the marionettes of the Italian political theatre. She uses the sounds of the Tempio di Mercurio, recalling noises from factory buildings occupied by mutinous workers.
In this Babel of signs and styles, Sepe manages to render perfectly clear the voice of a Norwegian singer, stammering Napolian and other dialects of Southern Italy. Auli Kokko says Sepe "used to sing in a female heavy metal band in Scandinavia. One day she grabbed her sleeping bag, came to Naples and fell in love. With her we're also now doing 'Chebba' by Khaled."