Deca - Scores for an Alien Orchestra

Federico De Caroli, known by the stage name Deca, has used experimentation as a gateway to an ever-evolving stylistic journey rather than as an end in itself. A great conjurer of dreamlike suggestions, he started out from the lessons of the cosmic school to arrive at a personal alchemy of tradition and innovation, grafting the paradigms of artificial sound onto natural sound and drawing on various genres without tying himself to any one in particular.

A protagonist of the electronic and industrial scene since the 1980s, he has never enjoyed great fame, owing to the sheer breadth and variety of his output and to uncompromising editorial choices that have kept the distribution of his records aimed mainly at enthusiasts and collectors.

Deca has nevertheless become a point of reference for other musicians and one of the most highly regarded sound creators around, capable of making entire albums with a single instrument or coaxing dozens of timbres out of a single noise. He represents an eclectic figure of a musician who has ranged, with a highly personal originality, from the purest electronics to pianistic minimalism, never giving in to the temptation of following trends and constantly reinventing himself, following a path that runs in reverse to that of other artists - one that took him from all-in-all predictable beginnings (descriptive, ambient, techno-pop music) to hermetic, complex experimental concept albums.

Besides releasing around ten official albums, Deca has signed off on numerous side projects, bringing his experience as a composer to theatre, cinema, multimedia art and ballet, and putting his research into the contamination between genres to concrete use. The author of various short stories, collections of poems and short films, he has built his narrative style around Dreamlike Distortion (Distorsione Onirica), a kind of philosophical manifesto that for over a decade has involved a sizeable group of artists.

Born in 1964, a piano graduate with a degree in modern literature, Federico De Caroli released his first amateur works in the early 1980s under the pseudonym Deca, making his first approach to electronic sound on a polyphonic analogue synthesizer. The classical, pianistic background seems to prevail even in his use of the sequencer, which weaves harmonic patterns that graft Baroque sensations onto typically synthetic sonorities. The influence of musicians such as Jean-Michel Jarre and Tangerine Dream is strong, as is that of Kraftwerk, Rockets and Vangelis.

Out of these recordings grew his first true album (Alkaid, 1986), released by a small label and inspired by a science-fiction story he wrote himself. The catchiness of the melodies and the charm of certain atmospheres make up for the roughness of the arrangements, which exploit every kind of electronic effect to imbue tracks of a sometimes symphonic, sometimes pop, or even vaguely Oriental cast ("Cosmo India", "Alkaid") with a futuristic style.

At the same time, Deca worked as an arranger and sound engineer in various recording studios, broadening his experience in record production and gaining access to increasingly professional equipment.

1987 brought the album Synthetic Lips, the crowning achievement of his easier-listening period and of rhythmic-harmonic structures inspired by the cosmic school and by typically cinematic music. There are many references to Jarre and Tangerine Dream right from the track titles ("Hydrogene", "Tangram"), which seem to pay homage to the era in which electronic music went from an elitist pursuit to a mass phenomenon. Once again, the album's strength lies in its ethereal, melancholy melodies woven over beds of sequencers, arpeggiators and drum machines.

In 1989 a first turning point came with the album Claustrophobia, a dark, minimalist manifesto of anguished states of mind. The imagery turns gothic, the music strips away sound effects and highlights obsessive, nihilistic atmospheres built from synthetic harpsichords ("Carnal Flowers", "Liquid Animals") or liturgical organs ("Cathedral Of Nightmares"), underpinned by heavy, metallic rhythms. The album also features three sung tracks ("Inframorte", "Metamorphosis", "Private Panic"), where the voice is simply one instrument among others, reciting phonemes of a cryptographic language, "tecnoi", invented and codified by Deca himself. Poised between new wave and industrial sound, this third record opens up a more radical and personal path, one that would clearly prove germinal for the years to come.

With Premonizione Humana in 1992, Deca produced a kind of summa of his early compositional experiences: he returns to fuller, more symphonic atmospheres, sharpens the conceptual element, and layers abrasive synthetic sounds over string sections and pianos. The album was released only on CD and is perhaps the only one of his to have been distributed widely and in large numbers.

But as a counterpoint to Premonizione Humana, he also made some recordings of music entirely outside any convention - tracks of unheard-of violence and speed that cram in bursts of magmatic sounds fired off in a delirious, Dadaist manner. Dubbed "digitrash", this occasional invention was presented on a few radio broadcasts, leaving both DJs and listeners stunned.

1992 was also the year Deca returned to performing live after a long hiatus, with an audiovisual format that would be continuously refined through a system of computerized lighting and the projection of original films, computer graphics and animations by photographer Gianni Bacino.

Over the following five years no official album was released, yet the composer's activity flourished on many fronts, with at least a dozen more or less experimental works seeing the light of day, later used to score documentaries, theatre productions, ballets and multimedia installations. Among these, mention must certainly be made of Mater Frequentia, Sodoma, Deceit Of Time, as well as some collaborations on the projects known as Argiope and Acanthometra, and the brief parenthesis of the Android techno productions (four tracks released on a 12" mix).

The album Phantom, from 1998, represents the new arrival point in Deca's journey and the outcome of those five years of varied recordings. The fruit of a year's work and troubled production sessions, Phantom is perhaps his clearest attempt to combine and reconcile sonic experimentation with an orthodox musical structure. Cold, expansive horizons offset the vision of the ghosts each of us carries within: intriguing rhythmic sequences unfold over beds of synthetic noise ("Extraterrestrial Part I-II"), alien voices echo amid flashes of electronic timpani and lashes of bizarre percussion instruments ("Vision Of Faith"), digital organs announce strange liturgies ("Dreams And Tears", "Extraterrestrial Part IV"). Deca's sonic world takes shape in a succession of mental tableaux that, amid cyberpop winks and sinister technological atmospheres, closes with the melancholy, dreamlike title track "Phantoms".

With Phantom, some critics began talking about neg-age, a cultural strand opposed to the new age trend fashionable at the time. The oneiric and esoteric matrix in the composer's musical narrative becomes more pronounced, and its introspective components turn into metaphors for a broader condition of the human species. The sense of desolation and disillusionment no longer belongs to the pseudo-sci-fi allegories of the early albums, but rather to the emotional reflection that the history of evolution and society project onto the individual. Not a yearning for a better, more prosperous era, then, but the acknowledgment of a reality that is in fact worse and alienating.

In 2000, Electronauta was released, the only official compilation in Deca's discography, gathering unreleased tracks recorded over the course of a decade in a spirit more playful than experimental. Though inspired by the unsettling biomechanical art of H.R. Giger, these tracks have a strong rhythmic imprint with atmospheres halfway between techno-pop and ebm, recalling bands like Clock DVA and Front Line Assembly. The sound returns closer to the dry, metallic tone of Claustrophobia, but with a different verve, one that makes these twelve episodes iridescent and bizarre, seemingly perfect for a cyberpunk sci-fi series. Amid the rhythmic interweavings, a melancholic vein occasionally surfaces ("Bodances", "Biomechanic Terminal"), tempering the sense of urgency and whirl present in most of the tracks ("Pnakotic", "Dreams Run", "Coma Flowers", "Clone Vision").

After a months-long tour centered on the theme of anorexia — which sparks heated debate in the newspapers — Deca begins work on the ambitious project Simbionte, which sees the light of day in the summer of 2002. An album containing just half an hour of music, pressed in very few copies, as it was officially distributed worldwide through a dedicated website.

Simbionte is perhaps the most interesting and fascinating thing Deca has ever produced: a dark, abyssal fresco that, by narrating the extinction of two alien civilizations, traces a metaphor for relationships between individuals. The eight tracks, with their apocalyptic titles ("Obscure Epidemy", "Alien Generator", "Enthropia", "Cryotmorphic"), offer an extremely vast array of sound elaborations and atmospheres worthy of H.P. Lovecraft's novels, between cadenced rhythms like stellar pulsations, nightmarish vocal resonances, distorted mantras, and instruments with a demonic jingle.
Simbionte pushes into territory where the experimentation remains evident even in the precise structural organization of the music, which has its own identity yet cannot be traced back to any stylistic orthodoxy. In this kind of hallucinatory ambient soundtrack, echoes emerge of early Current 93, of Coil, of Can. The personal imprint, however, remains strong and lends coherence to a work that is as imaginatively engaging as few others. Credit goes above all to the extraordinary depth of the sounds, created by filtering and manipulating ambient noise, voices, pianos and percussion within the intense magma of an alien orchestra.

From 2002 onward, the long streak of success and acclaim earned by Simbionte most likely led Deca to delay the release of a new album, one he would return to repeatedly over several years. The album, namely Aracnis Radiarum, would in fact see the light at the start of 2007, closing out a period of extra-disciplinary projects (such as theatrical direction and artistic direction for video productions) and new technological approaches to sound explored within the Atom Institute.
Aracnis Radiarum feels less like a surprise than a confirmation, almost a posthumous work that sums up a phase begun fifteen years earlier and rich in constantly evolving musical approaches. The album's twelve tracks seem to draw on the composer's vast repertoire, reinterpreting in an even darker, more cosmic key the symphonic quality of Premonizione Humana, certain rarefactions of Sodoma, the rhythmic patterns of Phantom. So those expecting a continuation of Simbionte's sensational sonorities instead find a work that is more musical in the strict sense, a visionary soundtrack made of shifting atmospheres, with an astonishing audio quality that draws the listener in and perfectly conveys the idea of alien worlds and dreamlike environments.
Among the standout tracks are "Time Transmitter", "Autoclone Euscorpius", "Pandinus Imperator" and "Extoid".

Having returned once again to theatre and multimedia performance forms between 2008 and 2009, Deca temporarily goes back to the piano for a one-off date in the eighteenth-century theatre of his hometown (Savona), performing a rare, minimalist, neo-classical performance. He then sets to work on the final stages of recording a new album, released in September 2010 under the title Automa Ashes.
A descendant of the more celebrated Simbionte, it partly continues its evolution, pushing the elaboration of sound sources to the extreme, to the point of near-unrecognizability, while blending the electronic matrix with light, melancholic passages that bring acoustic strings into the dreamlike, alien worlds Deca has by now accustomed us to. Among the most successful pieces, in fact, are the tracks that layer familiar sounds over the seething of digital vortexes: "Arcanaut Paradox", "Osmodes Enigma", "Sehsashes".
Also worth noting is the closing track "Ashesehsa", which plays back all the previous tracks simultaneously at a dizzying speed.
More challenging in overall approach and less innovative, it nonetheless manages to serve as a summary portrait of a 25-year recording career that has made him one of the reference points of the entire electronic and ambient scene.

Between 2012 and 2014, Deca devotes himself to creating a new concept album, inspired by a novel he writes at the same time, interspersing the two years of complex recording sessions with a special collection of old unreleased material. Modulectron is released at the end of 2013 only on 33 rpm vinyl, and contains partially cleaned-up versions of material that had sat in the archive for nearly thirty years, on tapes fortuitously recovered. Minimalist electronic music built on analogue sounds and sequencers, spread across 12 vintage-flavoured tracks that had partly sown the seeds for the creation of his first official albums.

In October 2014, Onirodrome Apocalypse saw the light, a new chapter in a highly personal stylistic evolution and, above all, in a path of research never sated with sonic experimentation. Produced in complete independence, thereby reaffirming his will to remain "niche", the album once again blends ambient music and industrial suggestions in a more fluid way, placing greater emphasis on the accessibility of its atmospheres and condensing all of its author's traits into just 8 tracks. He carries out meticulous work on the creation of sounds, transforming vocal and environmental recordings into something extremely electronic and integrating the more "musical" material with just a handful of synthesizers.
Unsettling, evocative locations on the beautiful cover art complete the work, making it perhaps the most convincing since the acclaimed Simbionte.

Three years later comes Isole invisibili (2017), a solo piano album that shows Deca's closeness to both the Romantic classical scene and 20th-century art (or avant-garde) music, through fifteen pieces for solo piano or two pianos.
If there is minimalism here, it is not a cold repetition of overlapping patterns, but a continuous blending of melody and classical Romanticism with pianistic ambient and soundtrack work in the vein of Michael Nyman, a fusion of the apparent simplicity of certain piano pieces by Erik Satie with the Romantic minimalism of Wim Mertens.
All the elements mentioned are present on the album, in the initial, hypnotic "Isole invisibili", in the touching phrasing of "Strade diverse" or in the frenetic Romantic melody of "Polvere di fragole", up to the near-fugue of "Athonik". Elsewhere, the piano becomes the instrument for sad, melancholic reflections ("Riflessi", "Malinconie di settembre", "Impressioni in mi minore"). Closer to the minimalism of Lubomyr Melnik is the cascade of notes in "Onde allo specchio".
A varied yet cohesive album, Isole invisibili confirms Deca's position as no minor figure on the national scene, forever in search of new paths to explore.

He returns to his origins, rooted in electronics and esotericism, with Lucifero alchemico (2021). Four compositions of equal length (eleven minutes each) for a total of forty-four minutes dense with piano textures, numerology, alchemy and esoteric dark-ambient that seems to draw inspiration, beyond the Lucifer of the title, from dark Lovecraftian worlds.

This long journey inspired by the fallen angel should be seen as a single symphony accidentally split into four parts. Within it, one cannot fail to mention key sections such as "Solve Roticruent", probably the album's masterpiece, a varied and restless composition that crosses genre boundaries. The airy synth opening, which seems to recall the timbral qualities of master Rafael Anton Irisarri, is interrupted by a sudden minimalist piano pattern that repeats continuously. Electronic rhythms overlay the piano, eventually giving way to the return of the first movement.

"Vorago Deboniana" opens with an endless chasm of synths, amid overdubs and dark ambient worlds that arrive at the third movement in a long, almost Floydian bass solo, a long two-note pulse accompanied by mysterious vocal recordings. It's a luciferian apotheosis, a long fall into a black abyss. A few piano notes introduce the title track, with an electronic breath in the background. The study of an alchemist summoning evil spirits? Or simply free men, unbound by imposed dogmas, in sincere search of truth? Once again the eleven minutes are divided into movements, with minimal industrial textures and slow piano melodies over ambient beds.

Incomprehensible dialogues burst into "Phosphorea Feromurd". Nothing human is present here. Only lightless underworlds. A piece of advice: to fully appreciate the album and hear its three-dimensional effects, buying the CD and listening on headphones is essential.

The career of Federico De Caroli, often marked by an attempt to distance himself from listeners, almost as if wanting to hide, seems in 2022 to open up more toward an explicit attempt at communication with the outside world. Dreamtown Piano (2022) thus conveys the sense of a phase in De Caroli's discography that is perhaps close to the recent piano works of Roberto Cacciapaglia (who likewise moved from experimental electronics to the piano), where the search for empathy and pure beauty is the central culmination of the compositional process. Deca reconnects with 2017's Isole invisibili, but whereas the earlier album was characterized by drier, more austere sonorities, Dreamtown Piano broadens the palette with more varied, fuller sounds.

The fourteen tracks capture the isolated, overlooked beauty of the few pockets of nature found in grey cities, as if it were a form of resistance against the encroachment of "civilization", almost like so many watercolors of as many rainy days, green corners or hidden sunsets.

From this "new" Deca emerge various touching compositions such as "Dreamtown Skyline", "Summer Solitudine", "Homesick Land" — just three examples of works often marked by simplicity, yet always in service of the absolute beauty they aim to describe. The official video for the track "Dreamtown Skyline" is absolutely worth watching.

Antimateria psichica, the twentieth studio album by the Savona-based composer, fully picks back up a now forty-year-long path in electronic music, doing so with painstaking studio work on the timbre of sound frequencies and absolute attention to the detail of the sonic material. It is in part a return to his origins, but it is certainly the return of a more mature and self-aware musician, able to carefully choose every single sonic pattern.

Industrial and dark ambient, certainly, but on the whole Antimateria psichica is a work of passionate sonic exploration in which De Caroli asks the listener for extra effort to painstakingly enter this acoustic trance through the meanders of mind and subconscious, drawing in part on the tools and ideas of the German cosmic couriers, in an attempt to put onto disc a journey into the mind, immense and complex as an entire universe. Tracks like “Proxima Neuralis”, “Plasma Hydra” and the title track take us right inside this mind/universe.

Completing the ideal trilogy devoted to esotericism and occultism, begun with Lucifero Alchemico and continued with Antimateria psichica, comes now Strategia esoterica (2024), his twenty-second release, capable of further expanding a constantly evolving vocabulary. The substrate is still dark-ambient, the tools mostly analog synths and processed keyboards, but the structures devised here show combinations more varied than ever, open to disorienting convergences. The best example of this approach can be heard in the splendid “Esoteros”, with its deeply icy synthetic wind that suddenly drops away to make room for a surprisingly melodic, vaguely baroque electronic landscape of real impact. Equally evocative is the juxtaposition of industrial atmospheres, sulphurous modulations enriched by unsettling vocal trails and dissonant fragments in “Genesi apocrifa”, a truly pitch-black ritual in which the elements most faithful to Deca's vocabulary once again dominate everything. De Caroli builds a rich, skillfully carved universe, a sensory journey that invites surrender to a sonic alchemy as seductive as it is dark.

Neuronte, a name probably halfway between the term "neuron" and William Gibson's famous steampunk novel "Neuromancer", opens a new path while still remaining tied to sounds that are by now recognizable and well established. In particular, “Neuronte” reconciles Federico De Caroli's three passions: science fiction, ranging from the aforementioned steampunk to dystopias and the soundtracks of Vangelis or John Carpenter; obviously electronic music, which has spanned all forty years of his career as a musician; and finally his passion for dark music, clearly evident in the album's darkness and above all in the videos for the three singles, well worth watching since they essentially act as three short films that help in understanding Deca's whole body of work.

With the industrial sounds so present on the previous esoteric albums now reduced to a bare minimum, Deca returns to a more cosmic sound, at times close to dark ambient, with an audiovisual link to a retro science fiction, as also evident from the cover, where Deca takes on the appearance of a wizard from the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. A few tracks stand out, including the title track, with its repetitive rhythm, a Vangelis-style electronic base and a distorted ending (perhaps a guitar) that closes things off enigmatically. “Serpente Paramentale” is the most evocative moment and also the most imposing, with sea waves breaking over a slow synth rhythm, minimal percussion and an electronic pulse solemnly dictating the tempo.

Afterwards the sounds become more meditative, the percussion almost disappearing to turn into electronic cosmic swarms (“Hypnosi Semantica”), into original echoes of classical music and science-fiction film soundtracks (“Koinophobia”), and into an inscrutable black electronic sea (“Onironaut”).

Neuronte is therefore a journey into the mind, into the thousand possibilities of hybridization between man and machine that may be revealed in the near future, amid robotics, alchemy, telepathy and dream. An album that is also a cosmic journey into the cold infinity of deep space, perhaps the truest possible comparison with the human mind, capable of both bottomless abysses and magnificent heights.

Contributions from Valerio D’Onofrio (“Isole invisibili”, “Lucifero alchemico”, “Dreamtown Piano”, “Antimateria Psichica”, “Neuronte”), Peppe Trotta (“Strategia esoterica”)

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google