Photo credit: Jacopo Paglione
Something new to us here at DeClunk HQ. This is God’s Mom. There’s an album out and a new single. If DeClunk had a nightclub this would be playing tonight. Read the blurb then give it a listen.
God’s Mom is the collaboration of Canadian artist Bria Salmena with producer and filmmaker A. Matthews to reimagine her ancestral Calabrian vocal traditions into a distorted portrait of the present. Today they share their new single/video “Maddalena” out via LMDD/Bonsound, taken from their album of selected works As It Was Given which is now available exclusively to stream and download via Nina and Bandcamp.“Maddalena” celebrates the power and beauty of community that the duo found in Toronto and Rome’s underground club culture.
Across the selected works on As It Was Given, recorded between 2020-2024, God’s Mom expands on the short bursts of dancefloor energy from their previous EP with a more panoramic and nuanced expression. Inspired by vocal traditions rooted in her Italian heritage, Salmena packs the album full of mantras, fiery assertions, and personal confessions, often explicitly regarding womanhood. Studying the polyphonic singing in Calabrese tarantella’s, documented in recordings from the 1930’s-60s, she found that songs sung by these women from her family’s native region were especially haunting: “in almost every track it was clear that singing was the purest form of expression, singing to release energy, pass the time, mourn the dead, and even happy songs are almost unlistenable at times. They sound far more raw than any punk singer I had ever heard”.
Salmena’s urge to draw on her ancestral connection with these traditions became God’s Mom’s foundation, “in order to understand why I need to express myself musically in certain ways”, she says. “The voices of these women in the recordings were the only things that could not be silenced by extreme religious and gendered oppression, and in some way, I felt I could give a voice to the women in my lineage whose only value was seen in childbearing and serving men. God’s Mom’s performance and styling are not hedonism for the sake of hedonism, it’s a reckoning”.
DeClunk 