back in 2019 i was making pizza at home and this email arrives saying my track italian gigolo was chosen for stranger things like when my uncle gianni won the lottery but lost the ticket and i thought it was a scam like those nigerian prince emails promising you money and instead it was actually … Continue reading How I ended up on the Stranger Things Soundtrack
Vincenzo Salvia is a Milan-based music producer and audio engineer known for synthwave, italo disco, horrorsynth, and eurodance. His track Italian Gigolo appeared in Stranger Things Season 3 on Netflix. In this post he explores the art of the take-away: music that listeners steal for their private rituals, their midnight drives, their unspoken moments. Not a genre piece, but a meditation on why intimacy is the real currency of sound.
Twenty tracks a year. Then silence. I've been thinking about what that means, and whether the music I made fast was worth more or less than the music I made slowly. There's no easy answer. But there is an honest one.
I want to go back to my previous post about démodé, specifically the part about the algorithm. Let me take a step back to the 2010s when I was releasing my first EPs and publishing them on social media with zero strategy. On Facebook there was an incredible community (the Synthetix group, for those who … Continue reading How to become a successful synthwave producer
We had an Italian AI called Emma-5. Yesterday, for 24 hours only, then they shut her down because she wasn't ready, she was giving wrong and completely crazy answers. Someone asked her how many R's are in the word "ramarro".She answered: "About 50 per day, correlated to population variability and age".Someone asked her how much … Continue reading Démodé
A few weeks ago I was at a dinner, sitting next to someone I'd just met. Small talk, work questions, the usual "so what do you do" that every Italian dinner table produces at some point between the antipasto and the second glass of wine. I told him I make music. He asked what kind. … Continue reading Can you be nostalgic for something that never happened to you?
Last night, instead of finishing a track, I built a retro game about zombies and pasta.Zombies... and pasta... Does it tell you anything? Well, if you know "They Speak Italian" and "They Speak Italian 2" (the EPs, the horror story about Italy running out of carbs), you can now actually play through it. Four levels, … Continue reading There’s a retro game in my Lounge now (another one).
Last night I was working on an Italo disco track. The usual stuff, my comfort zone, you know how it is. Honestly, a bit of a frozen lasagna situation, you know the result before you even start. At some point this arpeggio came out and I just... stopped. Each chord was doing something different. It … Continue reading The Frozen Lasagna syndrome.
This week I closed the "Album Stories" podcast with Europarty. It was the final stop, starting with outrun, traveling through synthwave and ending it with the unforgettable beat of the 90s, that era of freedom, shiny tracksuits, and pure energy. It was the sound that reminded us how to just dance and forget the rest. … Continue reading 22 albums. 22 stories. What’s behind my synthwave music?
For a long time I felt satisfied, complete, and I didn't have much to say in music. I went back to listen to my early albums. I immersed myself in those days again, I went back to relive those feelings when everything was uncertain, I still didn't know much about myself and what I would … Continue reading “Unfinished”, my new single is out on digital.
Vincenzo Salvia 