Roberto Rizzo

RR was born one night in the late Eighties in southern Salento, a land split by sun and solitude. His encounter with music came very early, largely thanks to what he absorbed at home: Kraftwerk records and prog, sacred music, chart-topping pop, MTV, the folk revival of his region. He spent his adolescence cutting up and transforming cassette tapes, increasingly preferring visits to record shops and the local social centre over the frustrating days spent at school. Electronic music and dark-wave were his first real passions, alongside his discovery of dystopian novels and the world of William Burroughs. A series of circumstances led him to graduate in Foreign Literatures and to develop an interest in anthropological studies, which is where his academic focus currently lies. He perceives existence as a fluid flow of aggregates, perpetually in motion — a concept he likes to apply to music-as-noise too, and to his relationship with it, which over the years has been enriched, at uneven speeds, by dub, American minimalism, ethno-fusions (particularly those applied to contemporary electronic music), and faint traces of black music. Opposed to any form of ready-made ideology, he keeps relocating himself across the map, convinced he can escape narrow identity- and nationality-based boundaries (he has lived in Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Malaysia and Poland); in his own way, he supports every expression of critical and independent thought, while the authors he lives for are Cortazar, Eliot, Pirandello and Milarepa. He has been contributing to OndaRock since 2010, as well as to a number of music-criticism projects in Puglia. In 2012 he worked for Civil Rádió, while on FusoRadio.net he hosted the show Larsen Effect.