Alessio Bondì

Alessio Bondì is a singer-songwriter from Palermo, Italy.
His songs offer a new and exciting perspective on the Sicilian dialect, which he privileges as a key to the unconscious—never confined to purely traditional contexts nor considered a second-rate language.

Sfardo (2015), his first album, blends folk guitars with poetic lyrics about childhood and suburbs.
Although his debut album showcased his solo classical guitar and hypnotic vocals, Bondì's second record (Nivuru, 2018) toured around Europe accompanied by a brass band mixing afrofunk rhythms with dark and soft lyrics about sex and anguish.
On his third album, Maharia (2021) an orchestra arranged and directed by Alessandro Presti enlightens soulful vocals and romantic lyrics.

After the pandemics Bondì took a break to reaserch the Sicilian oral traditional music listening to archive's field recording, learning old tunes and lost repertoire and ways of singing. This experience led to Lero Lero, a collective of artists that brings this music to life again with a contemporary touch.

With his fourth album, Runnegghiè ("Everywhere"), Bondì creates a world of extreme opposites, dense with darkness and joy, sweetness and violence, with references to the Sicilian oral tradition, enlivened by a contemporary touch.
The production by Fabio Rizzo, who also produced all of the singer’s previous LPs, highlights a Sicily marked by ritual drums, lamentations and Mediterranean guitars, with one foot in the archaic and the other in modern beatmaking.
Runnegghiè's mix of dialect and traditional and contemporary sounds becomes the key to a shared, communal emotion, allowing the listener to lose his inner self in a collective ectasy, beyond any language.