Human Rites by Sergio Beercock

“Human Rites” is BEERCOCK’s second album. All the activity around the record, starting from the music itself, the artwork and the video-performances preceding it, highlight the all-round vision of it as a complete act of art, and of BEERCOCK as a multidisciplinary artist using music as one of his languages.

Through the research of a completely new sound compared to his 2017 debut album, the UK-born Italian artist relies exclusively on his two main instruments: the Body and the Voice. The album has been produced entirely by Fabio Rizzo, employing only one microphone to record all the vocal parts and breath-and-hand beats, processing them to build the wall of sound throughout the tracks: an out-and-out in-studio performance by the artist and his producer.

Those “limits” BEERCOCK has imposed on himself in creating the album have pushed him to study the means and boundaries of Voice and Body as instruments, and to build an elegant yet powerful, while at the same time new and ancestral language. The “wall of voices” of the more choral tracks call to mind gospel but mostly ancient ritual music: a Rite made of human vibrations and collective energy.

The whole “map” of beats in the album serves as a bridge between the urban influences of Afro-American music and a more tribal dimension. On this powerful rhythmic foundation, the Voice - BEERCOCK’s master instrument - is free to express itself in dynamics and timbres, penetrating the sound and dominating it with density and poignant emotion.

The ancestral, ritual, both individual and choral dimensions are BEERCOCK’s final goal in this album: every track is an episode, a human rite to share with society, at this historical moment in which everybody has to rethink the deepest relation between the individual and the community, the physical and the digital, closeness and distance.

“Human Rites” is definitely a 2020 album: every sound produced by Body and Voice is generated by the tension of a human being, suddenly devoid of all superfluity and certainty of the future: a call to stay close through the Rite, while everything rips through all around.

Sergio Beercock is a UK-born Italian theatre performer, singer and multi-instrumentalist. As a musician, he published his first solo album “Wollow”. As a performer, he works in theatre companies also as a director. His new research leads to his new album “Human Rites".

Management: Fabio Rizzo fabio@800a.it