BIOGRAPHY

Riccardo Mazza is a composer, multimedia artist and teacher at the School of High Musical Specialisation in Saluzzo, specialising in experimental sound research.

 

In the early '90s he made his first album in the United States with the group "Imagine", carrying out all the production in person at Chick Corea's Mad Hatter Studio in Los Angeles and thereby developing crucial important formative technical experience. He returned to Italy in '93 and released his first solo album in the progressive electronic genre with Vinyl Magic, "The Virtual Cage", under the pseudonym Next.

 

In '94 as a sound engineer and producer he produced many house music albums for the dance music label Synthetic, sharing in their national and international success.

 

In '95 he began working as a product specialist with Midi Music of Turin, in research and beta testing for the biggest international music software companies such as Waves, Logic (ex Emagic now Apple), Opcode, Rodes and Event, and took part in the most important international trade fairs such as NAMM, AES, MuikMesse and NAB.

During these years he was still collaborating with many recording studios in Italy as an arranger and sound designer/producer for pop music.

In '97 he began working in close collaboration with Franco Battiato, who he worked with for almost two years carrying out research into new technologies in the fields of sound and experimentation. During these years he created a new experimental solo project, self-producing his IMP (Interactive Music Project) album Op. 1 (now re-released with Machiavelli Music) which debuted in June with an innovative live set at the Magazzini Generali club in Milan. This was the first live set spatialised in 10 sound sources placed around the audience, achieved by placing the musicians around the perimeter with the public at the centre

 

In 1999-2000 he created the Renaissance FX Dolby Surround encoded library, the world's first collection of sound effects for film and television made in spatialised Dolby Surround, and some years later he created SoundBuilder, the first software capable of adding a soundtrack to video, conceived for the creation of input in surround.

 

In the early 2000s he began new experimental research in the field of Contemporary Music, collaborating with many contemporary artists and taking part in numerous exhibitions.

 

In 2001 he founded the Interactive Sound studio in Turin, a visual and sound research laboratory specialising in the artistic design of exhibitions and multimedia pathways with strong emotional impact, which develops through the creation of interactive immersive video environments. With Interactive Sound, Riccardo Mazza designed some of the most prestigious exhibitions and immersive sound and video museum pathways in Italy.

 

In 2003 he discovered and created the psychoacoustic model of "sleep waves" which earned him recognition from the Turin Polytechnic and a series of articles in major newspapers and national magazines.

 

In 2015 he founded the experimental electronic music label A21 to research and produce new forms of expression in the context of digital culture, which in 2016 produced the double album Project-TO "The White Side" and "The Black Side "and Riccardo Mazza's monographic collection/anthology of 9 CDs, “Experimental works 2000-2015”.

DISCOGRAPHY