“Vare Vare” (2025) – Hersi Matmuja & Jacopo Conoci * Produced by Valerio Daniele, Jacopo Conoci, and Hersi Matmuja * Written by (Traditional) * Album: Lum * Label: Maladisco Music.
Hersi Matmuja (as Hersjana Matmuja) represented Albania for Eurovision 2014, singing in English and finishing fifteenth. Eleven years later, on the 2025 album Lum, she reemerges as a wellspring of traditional song. (“Lum” is an expression of joy that also corresponds to “lumë,” the Albanian word for “river.”)
Matmuja recorded the album with the Italian-Albanian cellist Jacopo Conoci, in which they explore the music of the Albanian Arbëreshë communties that have populated Southern Italy since the 1400s. The Albanian exodus happened after the death of Albanian-Ottoman War hero Skanderbeg, who had been holding off Ottoman invasions until his death in 1468.
Many of these communities speak a hybrid language called Arbërisht, which is the language you can hear Hatmuja using on “Vare, Vare” (let’s dance, let’s dance). Conoci, meanwhile, casts a spell on his cello to make it sound like a sultry upright bass.
A good reference point for this recording is one by the Italian-Albanian singer Silvana Licursi, from her album Far from the Land of Eagles: Albania Italy, recorded in 1991, one year after Matmuja was born.