Maffia + KFM Expanded :: Groove Safari’s debut album — free streaming now on Rizostream
2025 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Maffia Illicit Music Club — the first season ran from 1995 to 1996 — the cultural and sonic laboratory that between the late Nineties and the mid-2000s redrew the boundaries of experimental music, electronic music and club culture in the heart of Emilia. A unique relational ecosystem, capable of connecting artists, producers, DJs and thinkers in a network of projects that responded to no market logic whatsoever, but to one alone: the continuous germination of ideas, sounds and visions.
To mark this anniversary, and alongside the publication of “Tutte le mani del Maffia” (NUKFM027, 1 May 2026) — the first historical and critical reconstruction of the entire Maffia/KFM universe — Rizosfera-NUKFM has decided to make some of the fundamental records produced within the orbit of the Kom Fut Manifesto available for free listening on the Rizostream platform. The Kom Fut Manifesto was the operational and productive arm of the club. Records that are sold out, out of print, impossible to find: today free, for anyone who wants to listen.
Groove Safari — The Transit Station
Fabrizio Tavernelli is a figure who moves through the world of Maffia and the Kom Fut Manifesto like a systems operator: composer, producer, sonic thinker, capable of holding together seemingly irreconcilable instances — the Italian song tradition and avant-garde electronics, mutant pop and radical experimentation. Groove Safari is the project in which this tension finds its most openly hybrid form and, in certain respects, its most courageous one.
Born as a post everything project — post-Nomade Psichico, post-Materiale Resistente, post-Mutazioni — Groove Safari marks a sharp break with Tavernelli’s previous artistic trajectory. The choice to sing in Italian, in a landscape that was then strongly Anglocentric, is a declaration of identity before it is even an aesthetic choice. But it is neither nostalgia nor regionalism: it is the voice of a body that inhabits the present and deforms it from within.
The eponymous record inaugurates the Nanotech sub-label, conceived as a molecular productive capsule — a laboratory of assorted grooves cooked up in Tavernelli and Bronski’s freaky funghi. The tracks that best capture this mutant phase are Fenomeno logico, Cosmo Beat and Nei tuoi occhi: three distinct trajectories converging towards the same vanishing point — a song that refuses to be normalised. Groove Safari was the transit station between two worlds — AFA and Ajello — and, within the context of the Kom Fut Manifesto, it demonstrated that the Maffia’s orbit could contain the song-form too, as long as it was deformed, as long as it was free.
Within the club’s relational system, Groove Safari occupied a peculiar position: it was not a club culture project in the strict sense, not music for the dancefloor, and yet it gravitated powerfully within the Maffia’s magnetic field, feeding it a diversity that extended its boundaries. It was precisely the kind of non-linear attraction that made that ecosystem impossible to replicate.
The record has been sold out and out of print for years. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Maffia Illicit Music Club, Rizosfera-NUKFM is making it available for free streaming on the Rizostream platform. Listen here:
