SERA

Rome, Italy · b. 1995 · FARA Records

SERA (Serafina Ricci, b. 13 April 1995) grew up in Rome, raised inside the classical tradition — a conservatory-track childhood of scales and solfège and Sunday liturgy, a city where the sacred and the monumental are just the backdrop to ordinary life. She was the disciplined one, the prodigy who could hold a hall, and for a long time she believed the tradition was the whole of the world. What she didn't have was anywhere to put the part of her that felt trapped by all that inheritance — the sense of singing the same sanctioned lines over and over, beautifully, forever.

Bel canto first and completely — years of it, the real training. The turn came when she started to hear the cage in it: the beauty that repeats, the tradition that loops. She went looking for music that could break its own rules and found it, improbably, in bass music and the London underground — and in a collaborator on the exact opposite side of it. Her influences run the bel-canto tradition and the Italian operatic canon — real conservatory lineage — reframed by the modern crossover of classical voice and electronic bass music, and by the cinematic, harmonic-minor drama the hybrid allows.

On stage she commands a vast space by sound rather than movement — vertical, resonant, classically trained, a little severe — and then subverts every expectation the moment the bass drops. “Io cambio la legge” — I change the law — is the line she says sold her on the whole collaboration, and she still warms up on liturgical solfège before a session that ends in a 174 BPM drop. Disciplined, grand, restless.