Tone Glow 228: Gigi Masin
An interview with the Italian musician about his childhood in Venice, his love for the radio, and his new album 'Movement' (2026)
Gigi Masin
Gigi Masin (b. 1955) is an Italian musician who got his start composing from experiences at his local theater. Through his interest in composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti, he eventually began using a synthesizer to create his own musical language. His debut album is the cult classic Wind (1986). In the years that followed, he released a split LP with This Heat’s Charles Hayward called Les Nouvelles Musiques De Chambre Volume 2 (1989) and a collaborative album with Allesandro Monti named The Wind Collector (1991). In 2014, Music From Memory released a crucial compilation of Masin’s works titled Talk to The Sea, and he has been especially prolific in the past decade: he’s released two albums in the group Gaussian Curve, two albums with Greg Foat, an album with Rod Modell titled Red Hair Girl at Lighthouse Beach (2024), and more. His newest LP is a solo album titled Movement (2026). Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Gigi Masin on April 25th, 2026 via Zoom to discuss his childhood in Venice, his love for being a radio DJ, and his new album.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Venice. What was Venice like when you were a child?
Gigi Masin: Venice was very different. I used to go boating with my parents. There were less tourists, less houses, you could swim in the little canals, and there were a lot of people swimming in the canals with me. Now it’s absolutely impossible to do that because there’s too much pollution. But it was a very wonderful place—it was so incredible, and it’s so difficult to describe. You had no cars, no noises, it was just this island with nothing around you—it was only the sound of the church bells and the birds. It was a kind of silence that’s difficult to find on Earth. Nature was just a part of your day. When you walked around Venice, the sound of the boats on the water, the nature all around you, there were trees and gardens and birds… I remember the sound of the wind through the trees and it was so wonderful. Now there’s so many tourists, and all that noise makes it difficult to relax. That’s only in certain corners of Venice now, and you can only find them through actual Venetians.
How do you feel like those experiences shaped your understanding of listening to music, of listening as a practice?
Venice helped me so much to make my first album, Wind (1986). Of course, I played the guitar like many other people, and when I played the keyboards for this, I tried to play something simple and nice. When I was young I wanted to make a rock album, you know? But this music was different, and I started to think in terms of subtraction, realizing that less is more, that it’s better than having an entire orchestra. I found an old studio in Venice that was really wonderful. It was a sort of basement near the canal. You could play when the boats were passing, and it was a typical place in Venice where, once upon a time, they would just put all this old furniture in the space. They cleaned everything, put a mixer in, and put wood all around the space. It was incredible.
It’s a bit strange… when you go into a studio, it’s not so easy to feel at home. But that place, to be on the sofa with friends, it was so easy, it was so fun, it wasn’t a problem. The first album is full of passion but it’s simple: you get a bass, a little piano, a trumpet, and nothing more. I wanted it to be simple, and for me it was a fruit of Venice: Venice is not complicated, Venice is very easy, it’s very sunny, it’s very free. I loved it so much, and it was a gift to make that record in that place.
What sort of things were you doing as a teenager? I know you were interested in artists like Donovan.
When we were young, we had a rock band called Zero. Most of the bands in Italy played progressive rock music, but we played typical rock and blues (laughs). It was the sound of suburbia. We loved to play, and it was just for fun—nothing more. I played acoustic guitar on the side and it was strange… in Italy at the time, people wanted to hear classic Italian songs when you went somewhere on holiday or for your birthday. Instead, I played songs by John Martyn, Nick Drake, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, but nobody listened to that music (laughter).
I also started to think differently when I began to work in a theater. They wanted contemporary music from Penderecki or Ligeti. Hearing this music was an explosion—I was shocked because it was so beautiful. My fortune is that because of my theater experience, I started to work at the national radio in Venice. At the time, the national radio had a big studio and they played these radio dramas. I was 20 and working with tape recordings and I was like, “Wow, this is like Stockhausen!” I started to think about music in a different way—rock music was something you listened to when you were young and wanted to make some noise, but when you discover the beauty of contemporary music, from Steve Reich to Bruno Maderna, your life changes—it’s no longer the same. You listen to music in a different way, and I started to make my own music after I heard this contemporary music.
Can you tell me more about your experience working for this theater?
I was a technician at first, so I was working with tapes, loudspeakers, and microphones, but then on some occasions they’d say, “Gigi, can you please prepare some music for the drama?” And it was very nice because this was a time when a lot of groups created theatrical productions; the 1970s were really full of this interest in theater and contemporary drama. I started to use two turntables with vinyl from Penderecki, Ligeti, and Moderna, and I would sometimes play them backwards. Sometimes I’d use tapes to make a loop or a delay. It was one of the best periods in my life—it was like a game, and I was as happy as a child. We made dramas in the church in Venice, in the mime theater… it was a wonderful experience, the kind that made you want to do it for the rest of your life.
When this period finished—in Italy, things go in and out of fashion regularly—I worked as a radio DJ for a long time, but then things changed again and I wasn’t able to get paid from that either. I was like, what should I do? I said I should make music in my free time. So at night I was making music with a mixer and tape. But this was all lost—around 20 years ago, there was a bad flood in Venice and I lost everything. There was no more. I lost all the tapes I made for theater, I lost all the sounds I made for the national radio—everything. I lost everything. I loved them so much.
What years were you part of the radio and theater?
The theater and radio were at the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s and until 1994 or 1995.
What did you learn from your time as a radio DJ and working for the theater that you were able to bring into your own music? Obviously those are things that are more public-facing, that are part of a job, so what was different when you were doing stuff that’s strictly for yourself?
Music can speak without words or lyrics. And the use of electronics, of these tapes in reverse… you try to find new sounds and ideas. When I made Wind (1986) they said, “Oh, this is a nice ambient album.” But I didn’t know what ambient music was at the time. I just made something that felt like contemporary music. I didn’t find out about ambient music from Brian Eno, but from Ligeti and Penderecki. A lot of classical music was like this. Like Mahler—they made wonderful music, and didn’t need electronics. They used orchestras. And they really did make ambient music. Electronic music was another language, another possibility, and it was easier—you didn’t have to have people around you, you didn’t have to have a viola or contrabass or trumpet. You had a keyboard, and it was a simpler way to do the same thing. From the 1950s and 1960s, there were these experiments with electronic music from Russia and the USA and Japan—there were all these masters all around the world doing wonderful things, but it was not so easy to find.
Were there specific compositions by Mahler and these other composers that inspired the compositions on Wind?
It was not a direct inspiration, and you would have to listen to this music at home. Have you seen the wonderful movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)? Its soundtrack has the best of contemporary music, and you can’t compare what you do with these masterpieces, but you understand that in music… for example, there is a group in the jazz scene called Weather Report. They have a similar way of composition. Maybe the sound isn’t the same, but the texture and the ideas behind their works are the same. All people have these experiences; for me, I heard masters like Steve Reich and Stockhausen and I knew it was wonderful, but I knew that my music was not a masterpiece, and in trying to make music, you make your own language. I wanted my own language to be broadcast to everyone. Wind was a free album—it was not for sale. At the time I thought, this is my first album so it should be free. And what has happened since has been a surprise, but that’s what happens.
When I made my first experiments with a synth, I made these textures, these drones, and these drones were directly my idea of, not copying, but doing something that could be similar to Ligeti or Penderecki. Maybe Penderecki and Ligeti are working with orchestras, but the sounds are strange, the strings sound like metal, and I was trying to do something in that way. And the results are very different, but I was still very proud.
You worked with Marco Barel, Massimo Donà, and Allesandro Monti for Wind, what was that like?
I want to say thank you to Allesandro Monti forever because he spent so many afternoons and evenings in my home, listening to my tapes and saying, “Oh, you can do this.” I’d say, “No, no, it’s a joke.” “No, you can.” He encouraged me a lot. I strongly wanted to release an album and Allesandro Monti gave me brotherly help, and it was so great. The trumpeter and the sax player came to the studio and these guys were nice— Massimo Donà and Marco Barel. They’d say, “What do you want?” And I’d just tell them to improvise. Improvisation is such a wonderful thing—it’s the freedom to do what you want. It’s your language combining with my language. And this is the main idea in my collaborations with Gaussian Curve and Greg Foat. Freedom is nice, it’s super.
You ended up working with Allesandro again on The Wind Collector (1991), and this was after having made Wind and your split LP with Charles Hayward, Les Nouvelles Musiques De Chambre Volume 2 (1989). What was it like to work with him again? How did you grow together?
We played together a lot, and I think we are really brothers for that. He’s a wonderful musician and he’s still working. He was a producer, also, in the USA. But sometimes people drift apart, so we haven’t spoken to each other in a while. But he’s one of the best musicians I’ve ever met. He’s a genius in the things that he loved to do. I can’t deny it. He was so important for me, and I was so lucky to have him by my side for a long time.
I know you worked at the post office, what was that like? Were you also making music during this time?
It was a moment in my life that I had to find a job to survive, and I was lucky because I worked not in a post office but a branch of the postal service where you can move all around Italy. It was nice because I tried a job like that so I could continue to make music. But I wasn’t in a rush—I tried to discover what could be my future, and the main result of working with the postal service was making Wind. It gave me the time and money to make the album. At the time in Italy, it was not easy to make a record, it was complicated for many reasons. The [vinyl plant] would say that I’d have to wait one year for the pressing.
When did you start working at the postal service?
In 1985.
So you were doing this and the radio and theater stuff at the same time?
I started to do stuff for the radio for free because we have a lot of little radios around town that aren’t professional. When you love something, you try your best to do it. Now, it’s not really a possibility so I’ll do stuff on the web. But if you ask me, “What’s your biggest desire?” It’s to be a radio DJ. At the time, I was composing music but my heart is the heart of a radio DJ, to speak on the radio.
What do you like about it?
It’s about working at night… to be at night and broadcasting the music that you love for two, three, four hours. I’ll start maybe at 10pm and go until 1 or 2 in the morning. And it’s about searching for music too. I spent a lot of time and money searching for records in Italy. It’s not so easy in Italy to find music from abroad. I’m lucky that Venice had some nice vinyl shops. I also went around to some US bases and they had some nice records that they didn’t like no more, and you could get it for little money. It was lovely.
What sort of stuff were you usually playing?
At the time, most of the radio in Italy was really commercial. Only pop music. But at night, you were able to do more things you could love. Maybe in the first hour you’d have some requests, but for the rest of the night you could do Miles Davis, John Martyn, jazz from South Africa. It’s like bringing people into your house, into your room, and putting a record on the turntable.
I wanted to ask about your album with Giuseppe Caprioli, Moltitudine In Labirinto (2003). That album sounds more drone-y than your other works, and it also sounds a bit dark at times. How did that collaboration happen?
Giuseppe Caprioli was and is a strong friend. He’s helped me learn about a lot of wonderful musicians, like Jon Gibson. All the stuff he showed me shocked me. For example, when I listened to Charlemagne Palestine, it changed my way of listening to the piano. How could this be? It was a totally different passion, a different understanding of music. In the past, I listened to Cecil Taylor and thought it was boring. But after I listened to people like Jon Gibson and Charlemagne Palestine, I made an effort to love Cecil Taylor… and I did. His music has such incredible texture, it’s pure passion—it’s blood on the keyboards, it’s poetry!
So I asked Giuseppe, “Please do something with me, because for me you have the key.” At the time, it was already public that Björk had sampled my music, so it was easy to find a label, and I found one in Rome. Giuseppe is one of the best Italians. In Italy we say, “You never profit in your own country,” and people from other places in the world were more happy to discover different music. In Italy they prefer to just listen to the mainstream names that they find in the newspaper or on the radio without searching for anything. So if there is a great, wonderful musician in Italy, there’s going to be a struggle to have concerts and make money—Giuseppe is one of these people.
You don’t have to understand all the stuff you listen to. For example, people in Italy really love Frank Zappa. He’s a great musician, but when you want poetry, when you want passion, you have musicians who use music to go beyond the notes. And what they give you is this language of feeling… it’s like listening to the rain, like listening to the storm in the sky. This was an intellectual period in my life. And it’d be like, I can’t make music anymore because I can’t compare with these masterpieces! But if you pay respect to these great masters and you feel the need to compose and make music, you have to find your own language, your own way to make something. It took me many years, but now I’m very happy for all the things I’ve done, and I understand that this is the result of many years of listening. I’m still a student, really. You listen all your life, you learn all your life, and I’m always searching for something and I don’t even know what it is.
What have you been learning recently?
I’ve been in Korea and Japan and there are a lot of young people making wonderful music. People of my age sometimes become boring, they repeat themselves a lot. And then you see these young people making great music with great concerts and you realize, you know, music will go on. You read the newspaper and you see people wondering about the future of music. But you can only say that if you don’t listen to music, if you’re not searching. Come on! We have to listen, and all the world is full of wonderful music, from Argentina to Japan to Thailand. Every part of the world has people making strong music, and we have to be an antenna. This was not possible in the past, but with the internet, you can catch anything on the planet.
You’ve collaborated with a lot of people over the past decade. With Gaussian Curve you were working with Johnny Nash and Marco Sterk, and then there are those Greg Foat albums, and then there was the one you had with Rod Modell, Red Hair Girl At Lighthouse Beach (2024). What have you learned from collaborating with these people?
Collaboration is a way to grow. As I said before, you always have to study, there’s always more to learn. When you have the fortune of finding nice people, the music comes easy without any problem. You’ll find a great musician, yes, but not only that, you’ll find a great friend, and they’ll remain in your life. It’s great to learn their human side, too. A lot of musicians can have big egos and will not want to share anything, but it’s important for me that playing music with others is fun. It’s a privilege to make music. This is something we love, and to make something we love, and to be able do it together and to learn from each other… we spend all this time talking and drinking beer and playing music? Oh, this is wonderful.
Do you have any favorite concerts that you’ve played because of the synergy on stage?
Everything we did in Gaussian Curve was lovely. I remember a concert in Stockholm that was really great. I am very lucky because at most of these concerts, at the end, people are happy and want to shake hands and I’ll sign records. It’s lovely.
I wanted to ask about your new album, Movement (2026). The press release talks about the music connecting with the body and not just the mind, that it’s not just for solitary listening.
I need to move into the future. A lot of musicians work like a river… the water flows to the sea, and they move, move, move in this direction. I’m not saying that ambient music is boring or dead, but I have a personal need as a musician to refresh my language, and it’s important for me to say that my heart needs something romantic. Sometimes we need to dance in our room. And ambient doesn’t have to be dark or sad, and this is because life is actually happy. For me, music is about happiness. And it’ll be Sunday morning and I’ll want to dance in my room—this is my desire, so these things are coming from that.
I don’t think about making music. I don’t sit at the keyboard and think, oh, what should I do today? I do things and the music speaks. I don’t say, “I wanna make four tracks on the new album ambient and the others will be dance music.” I take five or ten minutes to make a track, it’s very spontaneous—or is just what comes from my hands. I love long songs, too. One day I’ll do that again, but right now, I’ll just dance.
Is dancing something you’ve always done throughout your life?
No. But sometimes I’ll go to the club because I’ll want to know how the DJ is working with vinyl. When I see guys working with vinyl, for me it’s like being at home when I was young. One strong idea about happy music is to have music in your room, on your seat, on your sofa. When you think about love and say, “Put that record on the turntable”… I want that.
Songs on the album like the title track and “Deception Dance” are firmly dance music. I’m curious about your relationship with dance music and how that shapes the songs you made on the record.
I have a lot of 12-inches. And for a long time, my manager knew this. I made dance music in parallel with my ambient records. I love this feeling, this movement, and it’s something that’s growing in myself. And I’m not trying to mix these two ideas. I’m a romantic guy, and I love to dance. On one end I love Underworld, on the other end I love Nils Frahm. These are the two different points of music, though I also loved stuff like Test Dept. and Clock DVA in the past. This is all music for the future. I had a girlfriend who took me to a Clock DVA concert and I was wondering why this group wasn’t one of the best known in the world. We only have one life, we really have to enjoy this music.
What does your perfect day look like?
It’s going to a park in Tokyo. It’s going there, sitting in the grass, and just staying. In this stage of my life, it’s lovely to go back to nature and discover the world. One of my big fortunes is that I’ve been able to travel around the world with music. You discover wonderful places and people. Now, I’m not old but I’m not young, and I like to just sit in nature and listen to the birds and be easy, be happy.
Is there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to mention?
I have to give thanks to my manager, Alessia Avallone. It’s not easy to make music your job. You need to be around people who believe in you. The music scene is a jungle, there are these divas. And it’s important to be around people like Alessia who can help this stay simple and happy.
I end all my interviews with the same question and I wanted to ask it to you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
I’m a clown. The people around me know. I have two kids—they’re 21, they’re twins. They love to joke, they love to smile. And life is easy this way. There have been challenges in the past, but in order to get through these times, you have to carry a smile in your pocket. My parents didn’t really understand me when I was younger, so I had a deep sense of humor and it helped a lot. When people don’t believe in you, when people don’t understand you, you have to be strong in your convictions, and you have to smile. It’s medicine for your life.
Your sense of humor is not a book with translations. A sense of humor is an instinct that you have inside you. It comes out immediately. It’s not a way of life, because we also have to be serious. But when you have a bad day, when you do something wrong, you have to be the first one to say, “Okay Gigi, it will be okay.” And a little sense of humor about yourself is the key to life. Music is not my life all day. And when music was not my job, when making music was difficult… when people don’t trust you, you have to smile. No depression. There are a lot of nice musicians who stopped making things because they didn’t believe in themselves and they listened to other people who said music wasn’t good anymore, that it was boring. They don’t smile, and they don’t have a smile in their pocket to save their life. I don’t want to stop. And when it comes time to die, it’ll be nice to reach into my pocket and die with a smile.
Gigi Masin’s new album, Movement, is out now via Sacred Bones.
Thank you for reading the 228th issue of Tone Glow. Clowns on top.
If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.