Lorenzo Senni

Often described as “ambient trance”, Milan artist Lorenzo Senni’s music builds euphoric, garishly textured synths towards a desired drop that never happens, creating feelings of nostalgia, poignancy and frustration in equal measure. It’s a formula he’s been working with some time, releasing his first album in 2008 via his own Presto?! imprint, then later gathering more attention with his 2012 album Quantum Jelly (Editions Mego) and last year’s Superimpositions (Bookmat). While in Italy for Turin’s Club to Club festival, we met up with Senni in a hotel room to talk trance raves, drunken hecklers and bonding with Evian Christ.

I moved there five years ago because a friend of mine – and when we moved to Milan together, he became one of my best friends – he asked me to go because this art collector offered him a big abandoned space to fill with with artists. He was trying to sell, but it was hard because it was so big, this huge factory kind of in the centre of the city.

We stayed there for two years. Me and Simone [Trabucchi], we were starting the label at that time, my label Presto!? and his label Hundebiss. So we started to have concerts in the basement. It was not a squat because we were trying to keep it… not fancy, but clean. It was very free, especially after the concert. So my first relation with the city and the sound and the club was to put on concerts and play music after that. It was us starting something which became very important for the city. We hosted Wolf Eyes, Peaking Lights, Emeralds, Kode9 played an afterparty. [It was] Just for 20 people and 50 and then for 100 – all illegal. This art collector knew everything about that.

Yeah, it was. But then we started to know people and going out to ‘real clubs‘ and legal parties. In Milan, it’s not the the best city to enjoy … I mean, it’s not Berlin or London you know? But obviously there are some good clubs.

Me and Simone, we are from Emilia Romagna. Bologna is the region. I’m from very close to Rimini, and Rimini is the Italo-disco place, where it all started.

Actually, my background is in bands. I was a drummer for many years. I’m old, I’m 31! So I have this background from being 15, 16 years old playing in bands until 22, 23. But when I was young my friends were already going to clubs, listening to trance and gabba. Gabba became huge in Italy and Holland.

So a few years ago, I started going back to what I was listening to in clubs with my friends during my teenage years. And I was like ‘OK, I know everything actually’. It was very familiar to me, all the melodies. Even if I was the weird one playing in bands. They were all wearing like big [gestures baggy trousers] gabba stuff. I was like ‘I go with you, because obviously I like to go out, and look for girls,’ you know? But I was the weird one playing in bands.

Yeah, for me, I would say the same. This reminds me of hanging out with my friends, even if I was not interested in the music. My friends, I liked how they dress but I would never dress like them, and I was liking the girls a lot. But I was like, “ah maybe they are too much for me”. But at the same time, how can you be in a club where they’re playing huge trance anthems and not be involved emotionally? They influence you. The typical trance way is a sound that Roland implemented in one synthesizer, the Roland JP 8000 in 1992, and it’s very rich in harmonics, so it’s very rich in intervals, and these intervals are something that can really drive emotion.

It depends on the context, I’ll play in the auditorium one night then I’ll play in the club, the night after in an art gallery. The reactions are very different. I’ve had a very brutal reaction that I really liked, when there was some drunk people who didn’t even know who I was asking like ‘DJ, DJ, boom-boom, boom-boom!’. Like they wanted the beat, and they were getting angry. And they were kicked out of the club because they started fighting with friends. Because [the music] was growing and growing, and they expected a beat at some point. After 30 minutes, you get angry if you are high or drunk.

I met him through the web, I knew his music before from the EP on TriAngle. He was commenting on my videos on Youtube on another project of mine, Stargate. He has a Stargate bomber jacket. So we started chatting, his [step]father was a trance DJ and we have a lot in common. I should not say this, but I think he’s a little bit influenced by me – but in a very honest way, because I was like sending him stuff and I was saying this is cool, we were like ping-ponging stuff. I’m asking him like ‘how do you compress this?’. We respect each other.