Alfio Antico + Go Dugong pres. LA MACCHIA - AU Tour 2026
We’re proud to present the live world premiere of La Macchia, the extraordinary 2025 collaborative album by Alfio Antico & Go Dugong, at WOMADelaide and Brunswick Music Festival.
A meeting of ancient pulse and contemporary vision, La Macchia bridges the sonic roots of Southern Italy with forward-facing electronic languages. Though shaped by vastly different paths, both artists share a deep, almost devotional exploration of traditional rhythm.
Hailing from Lentini in the Hyblaean Mountains of south-eastern Sicily, 70-year-old Alfio Antico is widely regarded as the last living master of the tammurinu (Sicilian frame drum). Singing in the Sicilian language, he channels the myths and folklore of the landscape that raised him. Once a shepherd, Antico learned to carve and stretch his own drums from raw, local materials, transforming the instrument’s role through unprecedented timbral range and phrasing that magnifies its expressive power.
La Macchia captures the full force of his intricate syncopations and percussive nuance in dialogue with Pugliese composer and producer Go Dugong (Giulio Fonseca), whose practice reimagines folk traditions through psychedelic textures and electronic abstraction. The record emerged from an in-studio encounter rooted in improvisation - a live exchange driven by curiosity and a shared desire to expand the rhythmic potential of their respective worlds.
The album’s title, La Macchia (“The Stain”), reflects its layered sonic terrain and Southern identity. As revolutionary anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli wrote: “There is the stain that is guilt, disgrace, and shame. Then there is the stain that soils the new dress. But we care about neither. Here, we speak of the stain that is life, tangle, earth, scent, death, rebirth.”
Here, Antico’s drum becomes earth-speech - primordial rhythm, memory, breath. Go Dugong’s electronics act not as a veneer, but as stratification: revealing and amplifying what is already there. This is a stain that imprints rather than erases — intensifying the ritual and ancestral core of the music.
The result is not a remix of tradition, but a living assertion of the South itself with its richness of language, culture, resistance and renewal. In La Macchia, Southern identity is not preserved as folklore; it is present, embodied and evolving.
Saturday 7th March 2026 - Kaurna Country / Adelaide
WOMADelaide
Monday 9th March 2026 - Kaurna Country / Adelaide
WOMADelaide
