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It all began in Italy
I am young. I’m fairly young. In Italy they keep calling me ragazzo (boy) — any male up to their late 50s. I am 35, so basically a kid!
I grew up in Italy in the deep south in the late 90s. Crazy times, I swear. No internet, no phones, and no parents around most of the time. The need to conform with the surroundings was key back then. It was too late for the rebellion of the 70s, too early to be pampered and treated as a glass kid that becomes a TikTok sensation (luckily for me). We were wild and left to play in the streets until sunset.
But yet, growing up, music arrived. The noise. The Californian hardcore bands, then Iggy, the Ramones, Fred Sonic Smith, Sonic Youth, and all the research to find stuff played by the Gun Club, the Sonics, the psychedelic 60s, and music on music. Conforming to the rest wasn’t an option anymore.
I became a teenager just in time for the arrival of eMule and SoulSeek. Every euro I could save would be turned into a blank CD first, and then slowly, slowly into original CDs. That was the shit. It was a slow process, but the dream was to own that physical piece of music, not just listen to it. But if you spend your life looking at paintings, you want to get your hands on a pencil. For me, that feeling became an obsession.
Two years of savings, birthday gifts, holidays spent working in a shop for 5 euros per day (no registration, just ‘helping’), and then it arrived. My first guitar.
The strings, the pickups (terrible double humbucker, actually). I didn’t even like that Gio Ibanez, but it would allow me to make some noise. That was it.
When you grow up, you have your crowd. In my case, I also had people hating the fact that we were different. Areas of the city were off-limits if we didn’t want to be played like drums. But I had my people. Still, they didn’t have that urge. They never took it seriously enough. And it became clear that I had to do something on my own. The DIY attitude is something I always loved about rap music. No turntable, just cut and paste some tape. No band, just steal some breakbeats.
In January (12 years ago), I used my first virtual drum machine and an EeePC 900 with Audacity to record a broken guitar and some keyboards. Cutting and pasting voices from movies and TV series, I recorded my first album. It felt great.
Listen to WZE / VHS - Pilot (2013 EP)
The best feeling was the power of doing something new. I’ve never shared it outside my circle of friends, but it was possible to make music with tools that people would never consider possible. Fast forward a few years, and I got my first real job, some money, and I was able to buy some instruments. My passion for electronic sounds took over. I bought, sold, made money off great deals, and tried for free a lot of great toys: Monotribe, Microkorg, Monotron, Akai Rhythm and Wolf, Electribe, Akai MPC500, Yamaha SU10, SU200, various Volcas, the Roland 404SP, MK2, various Boss gear, a lot of cool and vintage stuff.
But I always had something inside me that screamed for that DIY attitude. And one day I found an old Casio PT-87, and that was the beginning of a new passion: circuit bending and modification.
Watch the Casio PT-87 circuit-bending experiment
That Casio and a huge number of cassette players, loop tapes, and ISD1820 became a great training ground for what arrived later: AI.
I work in IT, and yet I am not a huge fan of AI. I don’t think it will solve global issues, and I don’t even think it will enslave us. But as a tool, it can make great things for people useless at coding like me.
Lately I’ve been working on a project using a Raspberry Pi Pico 2. Rather than only spotting bending points on keyboards, I decided to filter sounds live and add features such as sequencers or crazy effects. In my next post, I will go more in depth into what I am doing.
The goal is one: build usable and crazy sound machines with a cheap budget. When I was 15, I would have loved to have a synthesizer or drum machine, but at the time it was impossible. This became the core of all my projects: making music instruments with the cheapest components possible. As the people in companies say… that’s my mission. Fuck corporate talks.