Ossydiana Speri

I was born somewhere in central Italy in the late 1980s. As a teenager I sang and played in various local bands and ran a blog that's now defunct.

After starting out at university in Parma with ambitions of becoming a film critic, in 2009 I moved to Rome, where I earned a diploma in directing at ACT Multimedia in Cinecittà and in sound engineering at the Absonant academy. During the same years I attended Dams at Roma Tre, took part in around thirty film projects (about ten of them under my own name), worked for the independent publishing house Sigismundus, founded the "Large Important Rock" band Xayra, tried my hand at promoting the band Il Mare Verticale, worked as a sound engineer with various players in the Roman rock scene, and repeatedly brushed up against the local underground (including the poetic upheaval of "Calpestare L'Oblio" and the surviving members of the Roman branch of Luther Blissett). Starting in 2013 I was an active member of the Italian Wikipedia community. In 2016 a piece of mine appeared anonymously in the collective volume "MarcheCazzoVaiDicendo" (AutoriTritati).

In 2017 I moved to Bologna to play "Atavonic Rock" with my new/old band Dajadeu, while also dabbling in the anthropology department and deepening my knowledge of ethnographic documentary-making at the Etnofilm academy in Monselice. Since 2018 I've been working with Helena Velena on the Punk(o)etry project, which the following year led to the reformation of RAF Punk. In 2019 I was a judge at the "Visioni Italiane" film festival.

In 2020 I became a partner at the historic label Rave Up Records and founded Cassowar, my phantom label for informal music. In 2021 I contributed an article to the anthology "Ambulance Songs 2" (Arcana). Since 2022 I've co-hosted "Please Kill Me" with Laura Carroli on Radio Città Fujiko, and I play with the anarcho-punk band Intothebaobab. At the end of that year I also wormed my way into the Bologna label Sonic Belligeranza and the associated Megastore on Via Mascarella, where you can find me every afternoon from 5pm to 10pm. In 2025 I worked as an editor on Riccardo Balli's essay "Per Un Pugno Di Bling Bling" (AgenziaX), centered on the little-explored links between reggae music and spaghetti western cinema. In 2026 I became a host of the film podcast Casaba.

I joined Ondarock initially as a news writer, then as co-head of the concert calendar, and finally as a full-time staff writer, with a perverse fondness for live reports (which I consider the most creative and rewarding form of music journalism). Since 2019 I've also been contributing to our sister site Ondacinema. Not content with that, I've also written for Magazzini Inesistenti, Distorsioni and Just Kids, as well as for my own blog and my Substack (the latter entirely devoted to African music).