From Adrian Sherwood to Massive Attack: Almamegretta’s Mediterranean England
by Carlo Babando – 14 july 2026
Throughout their career, Almamegretta have travelled across very different landscapes, both real and imagined. They found Jamaica on the island of Procida and discovered the Mediterranean in the rhythms of African American music, before projecting the ancestral melodies of the ancient tammurriata tradition into the labyrinthine realm of dub. It is a cultural and emotional thread that has resurfaced time and again since the band’s earliest days. London, for many reasons, stands as one of the key crossroads of that journey—a laboratory where memory can be constantly reimagined. In this endlessly hybrid city, new musical languages have always been spoken: hypnotic, fluid and explosive all at once. You simply have to know how to listen.
As it celebrates its twentieth anniversary, Barezzi Festival will stage its first-ever event outside Italy, choosing the British capital for a particularly fitting occasion: the thirtieth anniversary of Indubb. Released in 1996 and still remarkably forward-looking today, Indubb remains one of Almamegretta’s most visionary and compelling works. It is an album that anticipated the future by redrawing its contours, bringing together languages, traditions and sonic experimentation through the art of dub manipulation. Its fourteen tracks—originally conceived in different studio and live versions—were dismantled and rebuilt by the band alongside a remarkable group of collaborators. Among them was Adrian Sherwood, one of the defining figures of British dub and the founder of the legendary On-U Sound label.
The relationship between Almamegretta and London’s cultural melting pot—where Kingston and Lagos intersect with Punjab, the Middle East and countless other ever-evolving geographies—has informed the band from the very beginning. It was in the clubs of the East End, surrounded by jungle, drum & bass and digital reggae, that Gennaro “Raiz” Della Volpe, Pier Paolo “Pablo” Polcari and Gennaro “T” Tesone fully realised that the musical heritage of their homeland was not simply something to preserve. It could become living material once again: sampled, recontextualised and transported into entirely new sonic landscapes. That intuition became the foundation of the band’s earliest recordings and, above all, of Sanacore—their landmark album, once again featuring Adrian Sherwood behind the mixing desk—which profoundly reshaped the Italian musical landscape of the 1990s.
Just as Caribbean musical experimentation had found common ground with Britain’s electronic underground, Almamegretta built a bridge between their own identity and a creative universe where hybridity lay at the heart of everything. The voices of great Neapolitan singers such as Giulietta Sacco and Sergio Bruni began to coexist with the sonic explorations of African Head Charge, while the traditions of southern Italian folk music merged seamlessly with the cavernous basslines of Jamaican sound system culture. With Indubb in 1996, that dialogue reached its fullest expression, unfolding through layers of echoes, reverberation and carefully sculpted absences. More than an album, it was a manifesto—a powerful reminder that roots are never a boundary, but the starting point for discovering new possibilities.
In many ways, this is precisely what London has always attempted to do: create the conditions for different cultures to speak to one another and grow richer through the encounter. Almamegretta understood that there was never any need to choose between a sense of belonging and openness to the world. It was possible to remain profoundly Neapolitan while constantly looking beyond their own horizons. In fact, it was precisely that sideways glance that allowed them to understand themselves more deeply. A perfect example came in 1995, when Massive Attack invited the band to remix “Karmacoma”. The result, “The Napoli Trip”, became the ideal meeting point between Bristol’s trip-hop aesthetic and Almamegretta’s unmistakably Mediterranean sensibility. Indubb would become the natural continuation of that conversation.
On Sunday, 1 November, Almamegretta will take to the stage at EartH Hall in Hackney, returning to the same East London where they first glimpsed the band they would eventually become. It is a homecoming that feels both like a celebration and the continuation of a journey that has never truly stopped. Because, when you think about it, Raiz, Pablo and Gennaro T have never really left that multifaceted, dub-soaked and endlessly exhilarating city—the place that played no small part in shaping their desire to listen to the world in order to better understand themselves, and to keep moving while still feeling at home.