Nu NRG — Freefall. How Giuseppe Ottaviani met trance music

Giuseppe Ottaviani: “I think I started with trance music around 1996—1997. I grew up listening to different kind of music. Classical music was my biggest influence during my early youth, as my parents used to play classical records every day. I have about nine years of classical piano education. I switched from classical music to pop music, to rock music and then eventually went into German techno music. Very minimal, dark and I used to love techno music. I still love it. But, back then I said, Ok, I love the beats, I love the energy but I am missing the melody from classical music. So, when Adagio for strings by William Orbit came out I said, Hold on. I like it. I really like this. Basically, the remix of Ferry Corsten for Adagio for strings brought me here. It was the perfect link between my techno sound and classical music. That was the day I met trance music.

Then I met new friends (Andrea and Giacomo) and we started to make music together. Andrea was already DJing in a proper club and I was just stepping into more progressive and trance music. He also had a very small studio and that was the first time I got to see a Nord Lead synthesizer and a Roland TR-909 drum machine. We became friends and together with Giacomo we decided to build a larger studio at Giacomo’s house.

A laptop wasn’t enought back then, so it was a rather long journey. There was no Youtube to teach us how to do things. We still managed to set up a large mixing desk, lots of keyboards, speakers, a vocal booth and the first illegally downloaded software, as we were on a budget.” (Name of their project NU NRG taken after Roland MC-505 sound bank.)

“While Andrea and I made our way into the musical path we both believed in the most, Giacomo took the bend toward more commercial-friendly horizons than trance. NU NRG turned into a two-man group and we released our first record called Energyzer on a small label from Rome called Synthetic. We also started playing together and got to play gigs in local clubs. Bringing all the hardware on stage to perform live it was just so exciting, but also unstable as hell.

Slowly but surely we have created our own sound, and have since let out our first true productions like Take your air, which arose as a result of several production, and then there was Dreamland, which was noticed by Paul van Dyk who has found our style interesting. Paul really wanted to sign us on his Vandit record label and offered us to play at the infamous Love Parade in Berlin. It was a big success and got straight into the Top 40 German dance chart.” In 2004, Andrea Ribeca and Giuseppe Ottaviani released an LP Freefall, which showed all the interests of the main author: classical and trance music at the beginning of the album and techno further on.