Nicola Manzan

Born in Treviso in 1976, Nicola Manzan earned his violin diploma in 1997, an instrument that led him to play with various orchestras and quartets of a strictly classical bent.

Starting in 1995 he began a parallel path in popular music, taking on the role of guitarist and violinist within several local rock bands.

In 2000 he moved to Bologna, where he began collaborating with various independent record labels and recording studios that brought him on as a musician for tracks by a wide range of artists. During this experience he decided to specialize as a string arranger and multi-instrumentalist, playing not only violin, viola and guitar in the studio and live, but also keyboards and accordion.

Since then he has worked in the studio and live with national and international bands and artists including Baustelle, Ligabue, Lo Stato Sociale, Il Teatro Degli Orrori, Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti, Fast Animals and Slow Kids, Mezzosangue and Bluebeaters.

He has written and recorded soundtracks for short and feature films, served as a tutor for the "Soundtracks" program, and is one of the evaluators for the "Sonda" project, both organized by Modena's Centro Musica.

In 2005 he founded his own experimental music project called Bologna Violenta, with which he has performed in hundreds of concerts across Italy and Europe, both as a soloist and as a duo. Under this moniker he has released six albums, five EPs and numerous singles, remixes and projects spanning harsh noise, hardcore and contemporary music.

Bologna Violenta has been studied as course material in the Digital Art program at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, where the project "The Sound of…" was also presented, in which tracks from forty different discographies are played simultaneously.

In the documentary "Uno Bianca – Mirare allo Stato" (shot by students of Bologna's Liceo Laura Bassi, under the supervision of director Enza Negroni and with the patronage of Rai Teche), the soundtrack is made up of tracks taken from the albums released between 2010 and 2016.

Since 2018 he has worked steadily with the bands Ronin and Torso Virile Colossale as guitarist and violinist.

In 2021 his first album under his own name was released, titled "La Città Del Disordine – Storie di vita dal manicomio San Lazzaro", commissioned by the Musei Civici of the Comune di Reggio Emilia for the Museo di Storia della Psichiatria.

In 2022 his second solo work was released, titled "Nikolaj Kulikov", an entirely instrumental experimental electronic project in which the Treviso-born multi-instrumentalist traces the story of a mysterious Russian soldier who, during the Seventies, was chosen by the Red Army to undertake a training program spanning earth and cosmos, aimed at creating a defense system akin to what the United States, in the following decade, would come to call the space shield.