Piezo

Milan-based Luca Mucci’s (aka Piezo) debut album pulsates with innovative sound design. Danny Turner reveals his battle to tame the ‘nerd tendency’

- Danny Turner

Italian-born Luca Mucci spent three years in Bristol, UK, soaking up the local music culture while working at instrument company Modal Electronics as a product specialist. Influenced by early trip-hop and IDM pioneers Aphex Twin and Autechre, his early dancefloor productions were pervaded by elements of breakcore, with particular emphasis on rhythm and percussive sampling. Following releases as Piezo on Idle Hands, Version, Wisdom Teeth and his own Ansia label, Mucci releases his debut full-length on Milan’s Hundebiss. Titled Perdu, the album is an extraordinarily hi-tech blend of dirty lo-fibeats and sub-frequencies, driven by Mucci’s insatiable thirst for complex sound design. A certified Ableton trainer, his production process is a constant trade-off between creativity and technique.

Your debut album, Perdu, seems to have a strong identity, but did it take a while to find your sound?

“Thank you for saying my music has a strong identity because it’s something I’ve really struggled with. I actually thought that the music on this album might be too varied or diverse in terms of BPM and style. Some of it contains very clean, digital, bleepy stuff, but there’s also lots of distorted, almost lo-fitunes. Maybe without realising it, it has an identity, but for me an album cannot have a single style because I always get bored making music and need to keep myself entertained.”

Maybe it’s that the identity is an expression of a side of your personality which goes beyond its stylistic construction?