BACAS is honored to host Daniele del Monaco as guest composer, in New York for the completion of the recording sessions at the renowned bc studio. Daniele’s first worked with abacas in-residence premiering his creation psychoplum at the Castello Macchiaroli in Teggiano, during the launch in 2018, where he was joined by Marco Cappelli, Ken Filiano and Satoshi Takeishi.

The ZONE’s completed recording and mixing will take place at Labelship in Sheffield, England with the debut expected in 2020 in Europe and New York - concert dates and venues to be announced.

The Sixteen Camels band is a super-band based in NYC led by the Italian composer del Monaco and includes fay Victor, Marco Cappelli, Ken Filiano, and Satoshi Takeishi. The ZONE is a concept album based on an ancient Sufi poem by Farid ad-din Attar: the conference of birds. The album was recorded for the english label Labelship at Martin Bisi's legendary BC studio in the Gowanus in Brooklyn, where Sonic Youth, the Swans, John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Fred Frith, Brian Eno and others have recorded.

The first version of the project was commissioned in 2014 by non Luoghi Musicali festival and premiered in Naples featuring the LCP percussion sextet: Blixa Bargeld and the Great Bulgarian master of Kaval Theodosii Spassov. a new version of the show was commissioned in 2018 by Romaeuropa festival and debuted in Rome last November with Marc Ribot as a guest guitar soloist. The new version of the ZONE became a collection of seven songs written specifically for a rock-band that represents the ripe synthesis of an experimental journey lasting years.

This ensemble puts together a wide range of different musical approaches: the original style of fay Victor's urban jazz vocals, the sophisticated guitar of Marco Cappelli - halfway between European classical music and improvisation, the echo of the "roman school" filtered into a rock and industrial synthesis in the language of del Monaco, the unique percussion style of Satoshi Takeishi and the inexhaustible creativity of bassist Ken Filiano.

The main argument of the songs is the relationship between beauty and possession: beauty withers like roses and can turn into a fierce tormentor for those who chase it. The album is characterized by a sort of melancholic transcendentalism and suggests the need to regain a harmonious relationship with nature, free from dogmas and cultural superstructures that make slaves of vain illusions as Gregory Bateson states in towards an ecology of the mind.

In the lyrics (poem), del Monaco creates a new story by making poets and philosophers dear to him interact with each other. Within the narrative plot of Attar, or the existential peregrination through seven valleys for the search for truth, we find the poetry of lord Byron, of Yeats, Keats, the parables of Buddah, the thought of Thoureau and Diogenes, the images of Ariosto, the clear reference to the "zone" of Tarkovsky and the Strugratsky brothers.