How did your relationship with Marco and Hell Yeah! Recordings come about?

Marco and I met in the late 80s. He said the track had some potential and I gave him the green light to release it.

Italy has a long relationship with dance music, if you think about the 70s/80s cosmicsound, italo and early 90s ambient house. What are your thoughts on Italy’s scene today and which Italian producers / DJs do you recommend?

It’s not easy today to follow a geographically defined scene because music is more than ever fragmented into genres and niches. Italian youths’ interest in dance music has very much to do with the level of freedom and anarchy it allows for, something Italians are very sensitive to. Talking about New Disco and Indie I love Slow Motion, Mammarella, Massimiliano Pagliara, Bottin, Tulioxi.

What piece of production gear could you not do without, and which is your all time favorite price of kit?

By far the TB303 and the Roland Space Echo

You famously wrote ‘Problems D’Amour’ after it was suggested to you disco is easy money. It’s now easier than ever to produce electronic music but do you think it’s harder now to make something original and stand out?

Yes I think it’s harder. Standardisation is all over the place. I have the feeling that most music composed today is “Ambient Music” , something that has nothing to do with ambient but merely fills the ambient and gives it some color. Tracks are specifically structured to flow without being much noticed, either positively or negatively. It’s “nothing”made up of notes and it is unlikely that being so used to nothing, someone may feel like composing “something”.

Tell me about your own label, Hot Elephants Music?

For years it’s been my excuse to release my tracks without giving any kind of rights to anyone but for quite a while now I’ve been releasing young emerging artists with a special focus on Florence and India and Sri Lanka where I intend to spend some periods of the year.www.hot-elephant.comThe latest releases are: a compilation of Tech-House and Indian Dance called “Indian TechXpress”, some singles by Hybrid Protokol , Determind (from Vietnam), ToneFabrik and “The Analog Session”’s latest album : “When Machines get Funky”

What new, original music have you got coming up?

I released a lot of stuff in the last 5 years, even too much. But it’s hard to quit what is probably the most powerful kind of addiction: producing music . I actually have two EPs ready (one of them will be “The Four seasons”) but I ‘m waiting a bit to release them because their sound doesn’t really matches the current trend . I just need some patience to wait till the general mood eventually goes back to it.

Electro is having a bit of a moment again, you can hear it’s influence in a lot of current productions, particularly from younger producers. What are your thoughts on that?

It’s like a theatre stage: one character steps in and another steps out , all of them are already known:. the butler, the mindless boss, the impossible mother-in-law. A play where it’s difficult to find any motivation for this alternation if not boredom . This is the entropy ofmusic.

Do you prefer to play live or DJ?

Until shortly ago I had much more fun djing at least because it was different than playing my usual stuff. But recently the search for new tracks to play is tiring me more and more and so I have more fun doing live.

You’ve worked across a lot of styles of music; jazz, world and of course electronic. Which holds the most appeal to you?

Life changes you and in my case it did so several times. I can only answer with regard to the present time. Now it’s electronic music. But if you ask me which is to me the best thing I did, it is a World/Jazz/electronic project called “Masala”.
https://soundcloud.com/masala-1
Thanks for talking to us/ Grazie!!

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