Francesco Zennaro

Born in Milan in 1989, he lives in Monza, Italy's motorsport capital. After finishing classical high school at Liceo Classico Zucchi in Monza, he is now enrolled in the philosophy department at the Università Statale di Milano. At age 9 he discovered Offspring, and at 11 heavy metal, through Motorhead, Iron Maiden, Diamond Head, Metallica, Exodus and Pantera. From the age of 13 he took a global view of "white" youth genres for electric guitar, punk (Germs, Bad Brains, Bad Religion, Fugazi, Minutemen) and metal in particular, especially in its most extreme and radical forms.Between the ages of 15 and 18 he wrote for Kinetic Metal Webzine, publishing around thirty reviews.After broadening his knowledge to post-punk (Public Image, Pere Ubu, Mark Stewart's projects), 90s alternative, blues and country, English progressive rock, and American psychedelia (Red Crayola, Grateful Dead), he came across the "revelatory" genres: the Canterbury scene (Soft Machine, Gong), German cosmic and krautrock (Can, Neu!, Faust, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, Manuel Gottsching, Amon Duul I and II, Kluster, Agitation Free), Japanese avant-rock (J.A. Caesar, Flower Travellin' Band, Takehisa Kosugi, Taj Mahal Travellers), Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.From that point on, electronic music, jazz (free jazz, above all Mingus and Coltrane), musique concrète, computer music, experimental music in general, new-age keyboard and guitar music, Romantic symphonies, medieval sacred music, Renaissance sacred and secular music, Baroque concertos, noise, glitch and drone all became objects of his technical, aesthetic and philosophical curiosity.Passionate about thought in all its forms (he's a great lover of non-fiction essays), about motorsport (he collects meticulously detailed scale models of both single-seaters and GT cars and prototypes), and above all about art in the broadest sense - music, but not only (from fiction to poetry, from film to painting, from sculpture to video games, from architecture to design) - he often draws on these interdisciplinary references in his writing, in order to make his analyses and overall synthesis clearer to readers.His aim in every review is to chisel away, sentence by sentence, at critical and historical study alike, enriching them with constant references that stimulate readers, so as to represent the work under examination as precisely and fully as possible within its own temporal and artistic context.He contributes out of passion to Die Schachtel, the Milan-based record shop and label specializing in experimental and avant-garde electronic music.