ROME The Naples rubbish crisis, which has caused a panic over dioxin levels in mozzarella and closed some restaurants, has now also spawned a genre of rock music called “Monnezza Sound” (Garbage Sound), with bands using instruments fashioned from salvaged rubbish.

Lello Cardone, leader of the group Bidon Villarik, and Maurizio Capone, of Bungt Bangt, said that they had made instruments from abandoned mattresses, tyres, wash basins, furniture, bottles, cans, pots and aluminium tubing.

“Something new is stirring in the shadow of Vesuvius,” said La Repubblica. It said that the new wave of Naples pop was reminiscent of the “Vesuwave” bands that emerged after the earthquake in Campania in 1980.

Vulgus, a song by a band called Almamegretta (local dialect for “anima migrante”, or “migrant soul”) includes a track called Naples Open City, which contains the lines “Look how lonely my city is, bloody like an open vein”. Francesco Di Bella, the singer with a band called 24 Grana, said that their album Ghostwriters was an attempt to encourage resistance to the Camorra, the Naples Mafia, which is blamed for causing the rubbish crisis by running illegal landfills in collusion with corrupt local politicians.

“Naples is an irreverent city. It doesn’t suffer in silence,” he said.

This month several bands are staging a music festival at Melito, in the Naples hinterland, for which the entrance fee will be rubbish for recycling in separated trash bins. Giusi Guido, the organiser, said that a typical fee might be five plastic bottles, two glass bottles and four newspapers. The new music wave coincides with the release of the film Biutiful Cauntri, an indictment of the blight of Naples and Campania and the high level of cancer-related illnesses, with a soundtrack by the group Paranza Vibes, a reggae group from Salerno.

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