One afternoon in Milan, Luca Mucci was explaining the concept of “perc-y wrigglers.” Mucci, who produces and performs music under the moniker Piezo, speaks of sound as if it were a physical specimen he had just caught out of the air, observing it with a mixture of scientific curiosity and mild amusement. To the uninitiated, his music might sound like the internal mechanics of a malfunctioning supercomputer. To Mucci, however, these sounds function as characters. He describes them as deviants with a mischievous attitude.
Since emerging from the mid-2000s dubstep explosion, Piezo has occupied a singular niche in the electronic music landscape. He is an Italian artist who sounds profoundly British, albeit too idiosyncratic to be claimed by any single scene. He began his journey as a classically trained pianist before abandoning the ivory keys for the digital signal processing of Max/MSP. This transition occurred after he witnessed a friend experimenting with Propellerhead Reason at age 18. The sight of these digital patches inspired him to start crafting his first beats, early efforts that focused on the fast and hard techno typical of the illegal free party scene in Italy at the time.
Piezo's career is a literal tale of two cities. Milan provided the foundation through a rigorous education, while Bristol provided the soul. When he moved to the West Country in the 2010s, he immersed himself in the city's legendary sound system culture, spending years soaking up local influences while working as a product specialist for a British synthesizer manufacturer. The Piezo sound would crystallize during this period as a hybrid of sub-bass weight and the high-definition synthetics.
Early releases on British labels established him as a producer's producer. His work on Idle Hands, Wisdom Teeth, and Swamp81 worked perfectly in the dark of a club while revealing intricate layers of detail during at-home listening sessions. The founding of his own label, Ansia, in 2017 signaled a desire to move beyond the established tropes of the leftfield club scene.
The name Ansia comes from the Italian word for anxiety, and Piezo's philosophy is simple. If a track resonates with him, he releases it. The Ansia sound features a playful approach, relying on groovy, distorted rhythms. It focuses specifically on feelings of euphoria and nostalgia while avoiding the clichés often associated with them. A clear example of this ethos arrived with its 6th release, Odd Hooks, pressed as a white-label 12-inch limited to 300 copies, with track titles that wink while the drums take their job seriously.