Enrico Cerrato, creator of the Petrolio industrial project, reaches his tenth year of activity with “Club Atletico Voces y Gritos”, a new piece that enriches his dark ambient catalogue, updating instrumental songs already published in 2021 with different voices. Petrolio has always been an openly cinematic proposition and the new “Club Atletico Voces y Gritos” accentuates its narrative aspect. The five songs follow one another forming a single common thread (we are faced with an electroacoustic concept album), also thanks to the voice of as many musicians who, in a highly original way, tell stories of South America in the Seventies and Eighties, torn apart by ferocious military dictatorships that suppressed every type of freedom and eliminated an unknown number of opponents.
Enrico Cerrato uses different voices to give voice to those who have lost it forever, such as in “La Picana”, with the voice of Pierpaolo Capovilla. The picana is an instrument of torture used by the government of the Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla (“First we will eliminate the subversives, then their collaborators, then their sympathizers, then those who remain indifferent and finally the undecided”) and by his Chilean counterpart Pinochet (“The rich are those who produce money and we must treat them well so that they produce more of it”). It was the Seventies, a decade in which the United States forcibly overthrew elected governments to make room for complacent generals: a horror that resonates well in the noisy chaos of Cerrato and in the alienated singing of Capovilla, which sounds like the strangled voice of someone who, at the end of his life, emits incomprehensible sounds.
Giulia Parin Zecchin (Julinko, Bosco Sacro) sings in “El Silencio”, a dark ambient song dedicated to the many desaparecidos. “2403” opens the album by recalling March 24, 1976, the day of Videla's Argentine coup, with a rhythm downtempo dreamlike, almost a funeral elegy sung by Breanna Johnston, voice of the Canadian dream pop band Pallas Athene. Feedback and distortions are the backdrop to “Y Nadie Queria Saber” (“And nobody wanted to know”), in which the voice of OvO, Stefania Pedretti, dialogues as if in a spoken word disturbing, where speech and shouting overlap as in a dialogue between the deaf, underlining the complicity of those who did nothing to prevent what happened.
“Strangled Cry”, with Lynette Cerezo of Bestial Mouths, closes with a perpetually interrupted song, as if to underline the impossibility of communicating with simple words the unspeakable pain caused by those terrible years. If Cerrato, with his project, has always tried to create a narrative within the world of experimental music, with “Club Atletico Voces y Gritos” he reaches his maximum storytelling potential, which is not easy for a music that has one of its primary figures in abstraction.
06/29/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
