CAMEO HD leans into cognitive overload—was that concept something you were consciously building, or did it emerge naturally through the production process?
I realized it was something I was building subconsciously. That sense of overload was already present in my mind at the time, so it was always a kind of hidden intention. At a certain point, it became clear while I was listening back to the first tracks and scrolling through YouTube Shorts. I was getting distracted by other things, and my music reflected that. I stopped for a moment and had a clear idea of what the album was going to become. My hidden intention was clear. From there, I shaped everything around that idea and decided to turn it into a concept album. It all felt very natural, almost impossible to ignore.
You describe the album as “doom scrolling through music”—what does that actually look like when you’re in the studio?
When we doom scroll, we move through a flow of random content where time disappears and attention locks onto fragments without control. But somehow we like it and want more. CAMEO HD works in a similar way—it’s like doomscrolling through sound. I ended up wanting more and more layers, just like you end up wanting more and more content in a feed. In the studio, that translated into sudden shifts, overlapping ideas, and a constant recontextualization of the material.
There’s a tension between control and chaos across the project—how do you personally navigate that balance when creating?
I don’t want control in the early stages of creation. I prefer my mind to be led by chaos. For me, the creative act is about letting control emerge from chaos. I believe in chaos—I intentionally build layers and layers of material, then I select, discard, enhance, and reduce everything to its essence. What I do feels more like sculpting than composing music.
The album is dense and layered—do you see that as a reflection of modern life, or more of an internal mental landscape?
Both. What shapes our daily life also reflects what happens internally. I tend to overthink, and I’ve been diagnosed with a mild form of ADHD, mainly related to hyperactivity—that’s also what HD stands for: Hard Disk, High Definition, but mostly Hyperactivity Disorder. My attention shifts easily, and that naturally becomes part of my music. Nothing stays on a single line. Everything evolves.
At 1.27GB, the project almost feels like a statement in itself—how important was scale and excess to the identity of CAMEO HD?
CAMEO HD is a byproduct of our everyday reality—something so dense and fast-moving that it’s hard to fully absorb in one go. You have to come back to it, like you would with a museum. For me, this album is pure excess.
Your sound moves between ambient, experimental, and post-club—where do you feel most at home within that spectrum?
I tried to escape a fixed spectrum with this project—and the tracks do the same. They move across genres, escaping a clear definition. I grew up in club culture, but over time I drifted away from it. I still love it, but I was looking for new ways to relate to it. I feel like active listening has partly been replaced by visual and performative consumption, and listening carefully is what music teaches us most. That’s why, together with Enrico Capalbo (sound engineer at Fonoprint Studios), we’re trying to create a different form of clubbing—something that brings back active listening. That’s also why I want to tour only in listening bars. So yes, I’d say I exist somewhere between post-club and film scoring, which has also been a major part of my work in recent years.
Do you think listeners are meant to fully understand CAMEO HD, or just experience it?
Experience it. Understanding it in a rational way is not necessary, nor the intention. For me, music is resonance—as it’s the organization of vibrations. If something resonates, it’s wonderful. If it doesn’t, it simply doesn’t.
There’s a strong visual and conceptual energy behind the music—do you approach your work more like a sound designer than a traditional producer?
I try to blend both disciplines—that’s what makes it fun for me. As I said before, what I do feels more like a crafting process than a traditional music-making act. The same applies to the visual side. The cover art started as something I imagined in my mind, then a friend of mine brought it to life and executed it in front of me while listening to the album.
How does your Italian background influence a project that feels so globally digital and culturally fragmented?
I always force myself to inhale the local and exhale the global. What happens on a micro level always reflects on a macro scale and vice versa. My Italian background definitely shaped my sense of taste in terms of harmony, chord progression, and nostalgia—here, everything often feels like an echo of the past. At the same time, in a fully networked world, I don’t see that as a limitation. I imagine I would make completely different music if I had grown up elsewhere, but with the same underlying vision.
After exploring hyperstimulation so deeply, did creating this album change your own relationship with technology or consumption?
Totally. I’m a maximalist, but this album freed me from the overstimulating world I had created in my mind and habits. Not only in terms of social media (as I was never really addicted), but also Wikipedia tunnels while trying to sleep, YouTube deep dives into things like Hungarian choir music while working, and so on. CAMEO HD made me realize I need to be less distracted if I want to stay highly ambitious, and I hope it can help other people as well.
I used to struggle with living in the present. Now I’ve learned how to deal with presence. It also made me realize I was doing a lot, but not necessarily doing it well. So I started doing less, but better. That’s my version of “less is more”—and that sentence really makes sense only when you can express complexity in a simple and concise way. That’s difficult, but it’s the direction I want to move in.
With this work, I realized that I’m in love with the process, not the results. Perfectionism was holding me back because it’s tied to outcomes. I wanted to free myself from it, as perfection is not natural—and that’s what differentiates humans from AI: perfect imperfections.
