Gilvian

Are you wondering why this music, and mostly where the name GILVIAN comes from?

Well it’s not a band actually, it’s a solo project, but I guess I’ll start form the beginning.

Guy raised in Puglia, south of Italy, born 20th December 1974.

Deeply attracted by music since very very young, but always disconnected with the Italian main stream music environment.

I was a kid in the 80s and I fell in love with Duran Duran: I loved their songs, I loved how English language sounded in them as some music itself, I loved their style, their freshness, their rich and fascinating melodies.

By the time I was about 12-13 years old, I used to love most of the english synth-pop landscape around then: many good artists, a lot of different and sometimes crazy sounds popping up all the time, you’ll find some of those in the 'inspirations' section.

That was about time I also found out Japan and David Sylvian, being Duran Duran keyboard player Nick Rhodes Sylvian’s actual doppelganger: so I got into their weirder stuff, probably one of the highest levels of personality, talent and braveness in pop music, and that made a deep mark on my way of conceiving music in general.

Most of my spare time then was about listening to Japan albums sitting by my 4 pieces sound system or trying to catch some new stuff on the radio and record it (ah, cassettes! The glorious beginning of piracy!!).

Later on, in high school where I was studying foreign languages, I got more confident with guitar music, and soon I was straight into Pink Floyd.

By the same time a friend of mine told me I should have take some guitar lessons.

So I did it.

And my love for Pink Floyd, now with a special attention to David Gilmour’s supreme talent, widened indefinitely.

Things that explain the name GILVIAN are there right now, but anyway…

The 90s came, and they brought one of the most incredible music talent tzunami I’ve ever witnessed: the Seattle Sound.

That was an earthquake in my life on many levels: I was about 18 at that time and I was overwhelmed with all these new, true, dark and powerful songs  coming in like one great album every month, and there was no internet to catch up with all this new material, so we were all very busy in listening, reading everywhere about new bands, buying cds, playing this new stuff on guitar.

What an amazing exciting time for music!

Tool also came out back then, and quite soon they showed themselves as the music aliens they actually are, besides always being a major inspiration to me and to so many people.

Later I went through University where I graduated in Philosophy, my other great passion besides music.

Then I moved to other places looking for independency and a better social environment, and it took a while.

Been in bands before, but they used to split up as soon as we had good material, so lately I wanted to cut out all the frustration of being left with good but dead music and I started my solo project. Sophia made an album called “technology won’t save us”, which might be true generally, but technology actually saved me from leaving my music in the hands of narrow minded people and from a fate of flushing away my efforts: so here’s where I started GILVIAN, getting by myself into electronic music but with some powerful guitars and getting to sing my own songs.

So what about the name GILVIAN?

For the name I turned to what inspired me earlier and mostly in my music life, what defined my very basic traits in the first place: I came out with a crasis between David GILmour, the reason I started playing guitar in the first place, and the first music poet I encountered, David SylVIAN, amused by the coincidence they share the same  name ‘David’, as a sign of a union between different things that somehow also describes my music.

So there it was: GIL-VIAN!

ABOUT GILVIAN'S MUSIC