![]() The label “underground music” seems to no longer be apt for someone’s practice when they figure out how to provide their services or products or works to as many people as possible. If you remember them, then you’re going to be OK.” I’ve been there, and what’s important is to remember those times. In a way, he and I share a similar understanding of how the dynamics of the ultra-niche collide and transform into mass dissemination by contingency and curiosity rather than intention-he gravitated towards the branded realm simply because brands were interested in his work, and he was curious about it: “I did it all,” he adds, “the gallery space with an audience of ten people and a broken sound system, the museum with an audience of 20, the club with 30, 40, 50. ![]() “And at the same time, I don’t think I ruined my career, because I’ve always made the kind of music I make, either for brands or for me.” “I started going out to fashion parties, started meeting people, and that eventually landed me my first gigs with brands including Nike, Diesel, Camper,” says Senni. The cliché of the starving artist who squats dismissed loft spaces and lives off the support of patrons and sporadic odd jobs is nothing new-Philip Glass, just to mention one, worked as a mover in NYC-but in Milan, patrons are replaced by brands, and odd jobs by the commercial application of one’s artistry. Milan was crucial for me because that thing was always there, I never gave up on those branded jobs.” In another city, you starve to the point that maybe you really have to find a day job that keeps you afloat. He tells me, emblematically, that his career was born from commerce: he and a group of artists lived in a former factory that a real estate entrepreneur and art collector had bought, who decided to host a group of twenty-somethings before renovating it: “This allowed me to pursue my own work. I meet Senni in his basement studio in Milan-he spends the entire day in his cave surrounded by cables, synthesizers, posters of punk bands, flags, and various music-related paraphernalia that indicate that he comes from a hardcore punk background. ![]() All the while, he’s distributed his works in the commercial realm, as if the two arenas were almost complementary, if not identical. He’s coined terms like “Rave Voyeurism” and “Pointillistic Trance,” played in museums and art institutions, and positioned his work as that of a composer. After signing with Warp Records in 2016, Lorenzo Senni became one of the regular names you’d see at big festivals and international venues, and has never compromised the ideas that guide his music. He’s a musician whose conceptual drive has not prevented him from conquering the experimental and the mainstream music scenes. ![]() I couldn’t be happier to have a special guest for this episode of Runway Music, someone who, I think, perfectly embodies the character of the impulsive intellectual. ![]() This person blends the high with the low while making their ideas clear and communicable-no matter how articulated or sophisticated they are. A class-defying, status-bending public figure whose conceptual activity is driven by pure instinct rather than premeditation and over-thinking. Although it seems that everyone is skeptical of ideas in Milan, we have developed, I think, a very peculiar type of intellectual that probably can’t exist anywhere else. ![]()
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