Roberto Musci

Roberto Musci is an Italian composer, performer, saxophonist, and guitar player, born in 1956 in Milan, Italy. From 1974 to 1985, he travelled around the world to explore African, Indian, Near East, and Far East music. During his explorations, he recorded field music, studied and collected ethnic musical instruments across many countries and cultures.

One of his major LPs, “Water messages on desert sand”, composed and performed with Giovanni Venosta, was Grammy-nominated in the UK in 1987. Roberto Musci released LPs and CDs with a variety of European labels, including Raw Material, Island Records, Music from Memory, and Recommended Records. He collaborated with musicians and researchers from all over the world, composed and performed music for films, live soundtracks for silent movies, audio-video installations, poems, dance, and theatre.

“Melanesia” is composed based on the Plunderphonics technique mixing traditional ethnic music with contemporary chamber music and concrete music. The artist combines live recordings of tribal ethnic music of indigenous people from the Pacific islands of Melanesia, performed with the body and with archaic instruments. Along with these, contemporary chamber music merges with the sea, wind, rain, and thunderstorms of the Melanesian islands, modified according to the techniques of Concrete Music, in homage to Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, two of the artists who shaped his way of experiencing sound.