Guglielmo Bottin (University of Milan)
"Inventing the discovery of a manufactured 'African' sound. Transnational circulation, adaptations and appropriations of Kilindini Docks."

In the late 1950s, a small corpus of music allegedly featuring traditional African melodies and rhythms emerged within Italy's popular music industry. Some of these songs were quickly "exported" to Europe and the Americas, recorded by international artists. My paper will begin with an examination of the origins as well as the national circulation of these pieces of music, which were initially released as singles and then collected in an album. I then will look at their various international adaptations and appropriations in different languages and markets. Finally, I will discuss the ethnic stereotyping and the construction of "authenticity" in exotica music in Italy and abroad, trying to understand this collection of pseudo-African songs within the context of the calypso craze, which was often accompanied by ethnic stereotyping and the colonialist practice of manufacturing a 'traditional' sound representative of a territory or a people.

Guglielmo Bottin
After studying psychology at the University of Padua, he worked as an arranger of popular music, composer for the media, as well as a producer and DJ, performing in over 30 countries worldwide. In 2019, he contributed to the establishment of La Biennale di Venezia's Centre for Electronic Music, whose activities he continued to develop in the following years. He currently is completing a PhD fellowship the University of Milan, investigating structural and perceptual theories of groove and technological practices of groove-based music production. He was elected to the EC of IASPM Italy, and has published on hauntology, musical futurisms, microhistories of EDM, giallo film music, and the intertwining of electroacoustic rhythms and kinetic op-art. He has recently founded GRID, an academic research group on italodisco.