Only one month to go until South by Southwest, the annual world-famous festival that takes place in Austin, Texas. The SXSW Music Festival will be held from March 13 to 18, and this year we thought we should go big!
That’s why you’re all invited to join us at Ciao SXSW! The Italian Showcase, featuring some of the hottest acts in the Italian music scene. Mark your calendars because on March 16, from 8 pm to 1 am, six promising performers will showcase their talent at The Stay Put.
As you relax and spend a nice evening, you will have the opportunity to listen to Arya, Baseball Gregg, Big Mountain County, Dumbo Gets Mad, Giungla and Sans Soucis.
And now that you have all the info secure your spot here, get to know the artists and listen to them in our playlist!
ARYA
Genre: R&B/Neo Soul
Schedule: 8:00pm – 8:40pm
Arya is an Italo-Venezuelan singer and songwriter. She is part of Atelier 71, an independent collective and music label based in Milan. Her style is warm and smooth, her lyrics are introspective; she freely moves between nu-soul and rap, hip hop and RnB. In 2021 her debut album, Peace of Mind, came out, gaining success both from the critics and the public. She’s part of the 2022 Keychange cohort and she also took part in international festivals like New Skool Rules (Rotterdam, Holland) and Breakout West (Calgary, Canada). On a side note, she also lends her voice as backing vocalist for Italian artists Mahmood, Venerus and Ghemon.
BIG MOUNTAIN COUNTY
Genre: Rock/Psychedelic
Schedule: 9:00pm – 9:40pm
Big Mountain County is a psychsexrock band based in Rome, Italy. In just a few years the band has earned international acclaim for their European and UK tours and participation in festivals such as ESNS, Fusion Festival, SZIGET Festival and Rome Psych Fest, where the press unanimously declared them “best live band 2016”. After having published their first LP Breaking Sound in 2015 and the live album Anachronicle the year after, in 2020 the band released its second studio LP Somewhere Else. The music features killer riffs side-by-side with soaring vocals and synths that color midnight melodies while the lyrics range from personal narratives to journeys down an existential abyss. In January 2022, Big Mountain County released a new EP Klaus, with three original songs and two remixes signed by Al Lover, cult name of the international psych scene, and Hugo Sanchez, Rome-based DJ and producer. The song “The Klaus Crossing” has been included in the Spotify worldwide editorial playlist All New Rock.
GIUNGLA
Genre: Rock/Pop
Schedule: 10:00 pm – 10:40pm
Italian artist Ema Drei is GIUNGLA (meaning ‘jungle’ in Italian). In this sort of tangled-happy-place, minimal pop songs with an in-your-face attitude have come alive: imagine them discovered this way, as if they were torn and shredded into a million pieces fighting a battle of mixed emotions inside herself. GIUNGLA is rapidly developing a reputation for her breath-taking and visceral live show: she’s played alongside The xx, Foals, Grimes, Franz Ferdinand, Mura Masa, Let’s Eat Grandma and Battles while being invited to play at numerous festivals across Europe and North America. After collaborating on a couple of singles with producer Luke Smith (Depeche Mode, Foals, Anna Of The North), she teamed up with Andrew Savours, known for his work with My Bloody Valentine, The Kills, Black Country New Road, and she’s currently working on her album.
BASEBALL GREGG
Genre: Indie Pop
Schedule: 11:00pm – 11:40pm
Baseball Gregg is a pop duo with a dual nationality from Stockton, California and Bologna, Italy. Founders Luca Lovisetto and Samuel Regan met in Bologna while Samuel was studying there. Here, their first songs took shape and were recorded in a flurry of late spring nights, eventually becoming the duo’s self-titled debut EP, Baseball Gregg (2014). Sam returned to California, where in 2015 the two friends met for a second time. Spending the summer afternoons shut inside Sam’s childhood bedroom, the duo wrote and recorded their debut LP, Vacation (2016). After publishing Ciao for Now (2016) and Sleep (2018), their second LP, the band started touring extensively through USA and Europe, appearing at SXSW and Iceland Airwaves. Every month of 2019 Baseball Gregg released a new song: these 12 singles have been then compiled into Calendar (2020). During the months of Covid-19 lockdown they published Indoors (2020) a 6-tracks collaboration EP with Chicago-based bedroom pop legend Boy Romeo. Two years later, the duo released Pastimes (2022), an album composed for the first time with the full band all together in one place.
DUMBO GETS MAD
Genre: Pop/Psychedelic
Schedule: 12:00am – 12:40am
Dumbo Gets Mad is a psychedelic pop project based Italy. It has been founded at the beginning of 2011 in Los Angeles by Luca Bergomi, with the release of his debut album Elephants at the Door. The record showed a fresh approach towards a mixture of musical styles and defined the project as psychedelic pop. After touring Italy and Europe, in 2013 a new record has been released, Quantum Leap. This album is even more textured than the previous and it explores plenty of musical genres, resolving in a mind-blowing psychedelic jam. Thank You Neil, released in 2015, is a more soulful record, inspired by American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson: the live recorded album shows a more elegant and minimal approach to the production and received positive reviews. After 4 years of stop, in 2019 the new single “Makes You Fly” has been released with the French Label Nice Guys, in anticipation of a new full-length album. Things Are Random And Time Is Speeding Up has been released on February 2021, and it has solidly confirmed the psychedelic nature of the project.
SANS SOUCIS
Genre: Pop/Alternative
Schedule: 1:00am – 1:50am
London-based singer-songwriter, producer, and guitarist Sans Soucis takes her name from a nickname meaning ‘carefree’: born out of a desire to reconnect with the uninhibited joyfulness and authenticity of childhood that all of us lose as we grow older, their music is a radical act of reclamation. Receiving praise from The Guardian, Fader, Pitchfork and many more, it combines elements of Congolese Rumba, classic Italian song writing, electronic R&B and alt-pop sounds. Accolades include the Music Music Moves Europe Grand Jury prize, the inclusion in Spotify’s global RADAR campaign, and TicketMaster’s breakthrough artist for 2023. Recently she’s performed at several renowned music festivals and events such as Cross The Tracks, All Points East, Pitchfork Paris and Eurosonic. Her latest EP On Time For Her is her most vulnerable work yet, tackling childhood and racial trauma and a search for her identity within Western society.