Savage Republic + Ab Uno // Urban Spree, Berlin

Savage Republic was a mainstay in the early 1980s Los Angeles art-punk/post-punk scene. Their innovative graphic design by Bruce Licher supported the band's ethos of making haunting and evocative music out of time and place, blending a variety of musical styles from both eastern and western traditions into their own unique vision. Their eclectic sound is inspired by artists like Brian Eno, Wire, The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Can, and Glenn Branca. Savage Republic has performed with or collaborated with similar like-minded artists including Buzzcocks, Graham Lewis (of Wire), Kommunity FK, Christian Death, Einstürzende Neubauten, Flipper, David Yow, Camper Van Beethoven, Psi- Com (Perry Farrell), Sonic Youth, members of Big Black, The Minutemen, Fugazi, 100 Flowers, and Red Temple Spirits. In 2022, Savage Republic released “Meteora”, their first full-length album in seven years and some of their best work to date. Self-recorded in a secret cavernous location, their mix of tribal textures, political anthems, and Morricone-esque surf instrumentals explode with sonic fury and again transport the listener to faraway lands at turns both sinister and beautiful. In addition to the world-wide release by Mobilization Recordings, Polish label Gustaff Records released a now sold-out limited lathe-cut vinyl edition and a limited lathe-cut vinyl Ukrainian benefit single that includes an alternate version of the album title track “Meteora” with vocals by Laura Mace (Foo Fighters). “Meteora” is a powerful modern update to the band’s well-defined post-punk ethos. Between sonic critique and meditative self-sabotage, AB UNO's drone- temporal drift is to be read as an anthropological study: looking for answers in the past we can find the future, returning to being a 'plural one' as the primal feeling of the cosmos indicates, opening a door to a deeper state of consciousness. Born in Berlin in 2016, Eugenio Petrarca and Roberto Di Ciaccio's project fuses experimental music made of drifting analogue oscillations to modular synthesiser resonances, with exotic field-recordings and organic visual progressions that build immersive minimalist atmospheres. After the experience between Colombia, Sierra Nevada and Bali rendered tribal landscape field recordings (as in the previous La Linea Negra on Rohs! /Lontano Series, Medewi for Musica Stampata and the self-produced Lost World), in Les Gens de Mogador, released in July 2022 by Dornwald Records, the journey continues to Essaouira, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, continuing the path of a sound anthropology and enriched with visual materials, in the collaboration with the Waxaw Ethno Roots collective that captured the album’s proto- documentary dimension. Les Gens de Mogador marks a further evolution of the AB UNO project: among the open-air markets amidst phoenix ceramics, the Jewish mellah quarter and the gnawa rituals in the story of sub-Saharan black slavery, the album is a physical reconstruction of ancient Essaouira, the result of two weeks in close contact with a land that tells of wind, blinding sun and ruins embedded in history.