Federico Savini

Born in Forlì in 1977, he was an outsider predestined from the start, being a resident of the rival province of Ravenna, and specifically of the town of Russi (yes, it's a town, since 1878), which also happens to be the place where the bandit Stefano Pelloni, better known as "Il Passatore", met his death. After a happy but speculatively unremarkable childhood, save for the development of an unhealthy cult around Jim Henson's Muppet Show, and an early adolescence spent in blissful, total ignorance of the uglier sides of the world, a concrete interest in music arose in him late, but in step with his approach to it — unlike what happened with the opposite sex. The beginning of his progressive and unstoppable auditory degeneration, a process overlooked by official historiography, can be chronologically placed somewhere among these cathartic events: Sunday wake-ups to the sound of Neil Young in his father's houseThe gradual fading of his original interest in cinemaThe refinement of an altogether "rural" taste for the things in lifeHis insistence on surrounding himself with disreputable friends Having completed his high school studies with honors, he had the bright idea of enrolling in Law. The mistake was monumental, and the experience proved psychologically devastating. The resulting state of annihilation would lead him to make an even worse choice: enrolling in Philosophy, with a focus on epistemology. During these years, though, his most crucial experience was as a seasonal laborer, which every August saw him transform into a proud sugar-beet worker. In the yard of a sugar refinery, now closed, amid beets, mud and rain pouring down on his head, he spent the best summers of his life, brilliantly earning his first promotion after 7 summers of honorable service — albeit in a role subordinate to a colleague with 4 fewer years of seniority. It was also here that the obsession he had secretly nurtured for the freak side of life, the wild side of the deep Romagna countryside, found full expression thanks to encounters with characters belonging to various and sundry categories of subhumanity. He then arrived on the Ondarock forum at the end of autumn 2002, during endless sessions of internet serendipity that occupied him while he was doing his (involuntary yet useful) civil service. At that moment he grasped the extra-pornographic potential of the web, which would eventually lead him to also become a rambling web-radio host, and threw himself headlong into now-legendary, cut-rate philosophical-musical-pretentious dissertations, which made him inexplicably well accepted by the community's upper echelons — this despite the fatal error of having made his forum debut with a thread titled "Seminal Records". Here he met, not only virtually, an inordinate number of disreputable music nerds, one of whom indirectly brought him into collaborating with the monthly magazine Blow Up, which someone still occasionally lets him scribble on. Meanwhile, he entered a maze of unprecedented job precarity, which saw him alternate — and more than anything, pile up, with predictable effects on his social life — jobs of various kinds and dubious contractual legitimacy. Not without some shame, he admits that, despite his age and the tiresomeness of the trend in question, he is still maniacally drawn to almost anything that can be musically described using ridiculous word combinations, one of which must necessarily be "weird" or "freak".