I am an Italian multi-instrumentalist and digital artist, born in 1977.

Music

I started being interested in music at the age of 10, when I began to play a very old, covered in dust and quite damaged guitar that was staring at me from the top of a wardrobe. String action was unconceivably high and maybe that kind of instrument was more suitable to feed the flames of a fireplace instead of the ones of my passion for music. Nevertheless I fell in love with it and the rest is history.

My first band was called Fire Dreams. We played some Iron Maiden covers and some originals, but at the moment there should not be any trace of that songs. This first project started somewhere around 1991 and lasted less than two years, a quite normal thing for the small high school bands.

My teens were totally dedicated to death metal, a musical genre that I still feel running strong down my veins. During those obscure years, I joined a band called Subtraction, that lately changed its moniker into Obscenity (at that time there was already a German band with that name, but internet wasn’t yet the main game or there was not so much diffusion in our area, so we didn’t realize to use a name that already existed). Our music was embracing most of the branches of classic death metal, that in those years was having its most glorious period.

By grinding riffs and guitar solos that are normally beyond the skills of a teenager, I gained a decent notoriety in my area, thanks to the numerous live appeareances, that luckily at that times were quite easy to organize. I still believe that today I’m living on the fat of the land of that years. Yes, I can still play fast but the tendons of the hands are no more so flexible.

In 1997 Obscenity changed their name into Karnak (again, we could not know that that name belonged to other bands) and our musical direction began to evolve in ways that we couldn’t even expect. The first official album, entitled “Perverted” was recorded in the same year, in the context of our first experiences of studio recording. The outcome was a complex, edgy and insanely virtuosistic product, yet very tied to the stylistic features of the brutal death wave of that years.

One year later Karnak’s line-up changed dramatically and took a direction far from the pure death metal core, by adding elements of jazz, fusion, black and horror to their music. In just six months we wrote what I still consider my best work: “Melodies Of Sperm Composed“. The title is deliberately shocking and deviated, the lyrics were even more crazy and the music went even further on. That album was officially published in 2000 by an Italian label and literally went around the world, getting very positive feedbacks from experts, reviewers and fans worldwide. Nowadays, even if more than 20 years have passed, I’m still getting messages from all over the Earth from people that want to make some compliment for that piece of music. Sadly, at that time we wasn’t so mature to make the big leap and that album remained just an iconic episode in the history of Italian underground metal music. Sadly again, Melodies is not available on the main streaming services because not all the guys that was in the band at that time agree with putting it online for reason inherent the use of the moniker of the band. If you are lucky, you can find it at some collectors meeting.

In 1999 I started the Goldenseed project, still active on the present days. The initial idea for this band was to recycle the songs that were scrapped by Karnak.

Throughout the years, Goldenseed actually became a sort of my musical alter-ego, in which I could channel everything that was not possible with a human band, due to ideological or technical limitations. With this one-man-band I made so far 5 albums, ranging through the most wide spectrum of extreme music. The third album (“The War Is In My Mind”) has been published by SG Records, the other works are selfproduced.

From 2002 to 2004, Karnak gave birth to other two selfproduced albums. The first one (“Tutti i Colori Del Buio”, yes an Italian title) was an homage to the Italian horror filmography of the 70s. The second one (“Laboratorium”) was a complete jump beyond every musical barrier, thanks to a completely crazy vocal performance by Garden Wall’s frontman. Our death metal roots were completely abandoned to give space to a very acid, insane and extreme prog. Those who were enough lucky to see this line-up performing live, still is referring to it as something really beyond every known scheme. Sadly, this new creation was not welcomed by the record labels that defined this work as not original (well, everything but than could be said…). However this new incarnation of Karnak didn’t last long and the next album (the last one I did with them) was a complete return to the brutal death metal roots of the early days.

In the same years, for a short period of time, I joined the Friulian metallers Revoltons as a live session musician. I had to replace a guitarist and a keyboardist at the same time, so by cleverly using proper arrangements, open tunings and some sustain pedal on the synthesizers, I could do both simultaneously on stage: a very interesting and challenging experience. However due to logistic problems, I could not continue that collaboration, but I still remember it as a really positive one.

After “Dismemberment” (a very meaningful title), I left Karnak after 17 years of being in the band, to permanently approach the world of instrumental prog metal music by entering a band named Azure Agony, with whom I wrote two albums, both published by the Italian label SG Records. We got a lot of very positive reviews by the specialized press from all over the world and played a lot of concerts in Italy.

Azure Agony, for different reasons, didn’t last long and the band member parted their ways, each one with his own different life story. So I could finally dedicate my time to Goldenseed in full.

In the meanwhile, thanks to the increasing internet diffusion and some old friend from the death metal era, I could make some guest appearance in various bands such as Gone In April from Canada, Sanity Obscure from Singapore, Minotauro from Slovenia and many more.

I also started to play the Chapman Stick, a very special instrument to be played in tapping only. With this instrument I participated (for the first time in my musical career without a guitar) in the first album of Celestial Serenity, a band strongly inspired by Cynic, with members from really all over the world.

Between 2010 and 2015, I participated to a reissue of an old local band named Rigor Mortis XI (the XI was added to identify the new version of the band, like many bands are doing nowadays by adding that tedious “A.D.” to their name). This project was intended to just play a single concert to remember the original guitarist of the band who died some years before. However we sealed a good friendship and decide to continue this experience with the name of Born Again.

Born Again published a single album entitled “Unprecedented Atrocities”, that has been published by a Polish record label. However that music didn’t have so much success and the band slowly quit its activities.

We are not at the present days. My musical activity is now mainly in private or online form, but I alway think about returning on stage with some kind of strange guitar and see again your perplexed faces!

Digital art

I’ve always had the passion for drawing and illustrations, expecially with deviant and obscure themes.

However, I could never give an actual shape to this branch of my creativity. Up till now. Thanks to the uprising of artificial intelligence, several platforms now allow to translate the so called “prompts” into real images, without the use of real colors and brushes.

Thanks to the collaboration with the Archivio Monografico dell’Arte Italiana portal, I’m trying to start something in the world of figurative art.