Ernesto Tomasini is an eclectic artist whose long career has spun among theatre, alternative cabaret, and experimental music, first in the United Kingdom and then all over the world. As a four-octave range singer, he collaborated, among others, with the Current 93 band, Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, Antony & The Johnsons and Marc Almond. Degenerata! pays homage to the eponymous genre which, in the first half of 20th century, voiced the pulsions of the new generations in a time of great change, giving outcasts a chance to organize and rise up against a status quo that excluded them. These artists used to gather in appointed places, defying censorship and giving birth to what the Nazis would later define a “degenerate music”.
Cabaret has brought to light the first feminists, born in the wake of suffragettes; the homosexuals of the big cities’ underground; the Jewish musicians soon to be silenced and then killed by the Nazis. With the piano accompaniment by Ornella Cerniglia who, after her academic studies at the Conservatory and the University of Palermo, chose to focus mainly on contemporary music, and especially American and Italian avant-gardes, Ernesto Tomasini lends his four-octave vocal range to an eclectic and international repertoire which is mostly unknown nowadays but worth remembering. Masculine women, effemminate men and much more.