Cul De Sac

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		Slide	4:21	Play
2		Wet Walls	4:20	Play
3		Smell	4:35	Play
4		Labyrinth	4:44	Play
5		Crystal Pond	4:46	Play
6		The Mirror	5:21	Play
7		Insane Being	4:41	Play
8		Devil's Sermon	4:32	Play

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Bitmunk Marketplace Service	USD $0.78
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Description

Alex Carpani was born in Montreux (Switzerland) in 1970 of an Italian father and a French mother. At the age of 6 he gave clear signs of a particular inclination for music, starting playing electronic organ and taking his first lessons of solfeggio and music theory. Later he passed to piano and composition.
He was gifted of an ear for music that his first music teachers defined "out of the ordinary", but his musical education has been mostly a self-taught one. He constantly refused to enter in a conservatorium and to follow an "academic" musical education.
He took a graduation in Musicology at the University of Bologna, he specialized in "music for film" at the C.E.T. (a famous Italian school of music) in Central Italy, as well as in "sound engineering" with top Italian sound technicians at the Arte Scenica Foundation in Bologna. He's also been awarded in several Italian and international composition prizes.
From all these training and forming experiences, he acquired the tools and knowledge to become an indipendent artist and to be able to produce his own music, taking care of all the artistic and technical aspects of a project: composition, arrangment, recording, mastering, creation of the cd artwork, promotion via Internet (by his self-built site), etc.
Alex Carpani is a versatile composer and his repertory ranges from progressive rock to classical music, from electronic music to new age, from music for films/video to electro-jazz, from music & poetry to jazz-rock.
The meeting with Keith Emerson at the age of 7 has been fundamental in his musical formation: Emerson's son Aaron was a classmate of Alex in his parents' college in Switzerland. From this moment, the progressive rock and the love for keyboards became part of his life, influencing his style and his following music experiences.
In 1990, at the age of 20, he formed the instrumental duo Gemini with another keyboardist and composer, starting to compose intensely and in a continuous way. Gemini recorded two concept albums: "Polychromie" and "States of Mind from a Surrealist Existence" with a mix of new age, Renaissance melodies and ballads and progressive rock. The duo made also several concerts in italy in which music, videos, dance and scenographies were mixed together.
One of their pieces, "Gentle Ballad", has been included in a compilation LP distributed in Italy. Despite of the interest of the listeners and the producers, the duo disbanded in 1992 because of soloist projects that started to overlap, just before the recording of the third album, that remained unaccomplished. However, some tracks have been re-arranged by Alex Carpani and have been included in his first solo album "Hypothesis" in 1993.
Later, the meeting with Mogol (the best Italian lyrics writer, author of Lucio Battisti's greatest hits) in 1994, when Alex has been selected to enter in Mogol's top level music career school, has been basic for him as well. There he studied with some great film composers and started writing symphonic and orchestral music.
From 2000 his attention has been mainly focused on the following genres:
- electronic music: he composed several electronic albums and has been performing multimedia concerts with fractal animations and slides; he also has been reviewed on the Italian electronic music webzine "21st Century Music" in 2004;
- music & poetry: he composed a 3cds-trilogy inspired by the poems of Edoardo Sanguineti, one of the greates Italian living poets, and 2 albums inspired by the poems of Filippo Finardi, another Italian poet and writer; in both cases, the music has been composed starting from the recorded voice of the poet reading his poems;
- music for theatre and multimedia: he composed the music for a multimedia theatre show called "Il Ritorno" (The Return) written by Filippo Finardi and represented in an historical theatre of Bologna; another multimedia theatre show has been "Cerco un paese innocente" (Looking for an innocent country), directed by Sandra Cavallini and represented in Bologna as well; he also wrote the music of a short film called "Passaggi" (Passages) directed by Dario Marzola as well as the original soundtrack of a promotional DVD of CMAS (an international diving association), that has been distributed all over the world.
- progressive rock: this genre has always influenced and inspired him, maybe because of the "magic" encounter he had with Keith Emerson when he was a child... In 2005 he signed a contract with Cypher Arts, an American indipendent label that will publish and distribute his prog albums.
Alex Carpani lives in Bologna, a nice historical city of about 400.000 inhabitants in northern Italy. He speaks three languages (Italian, French and English) and has got a true passion for cinema, computer music, vintage synthesizers and modern & contemporary art.
Besides being a composer he's the manager of the culture department in a municipality near Bologna.