Italian musician, producer, composer and instrument builder Alessandro Cortini is one of the foremost figures of contemporary electronic music. A longstanding member of Nine Inch Nails, Cortini has been releasing a steady stream of his own heady music on luminary labels including Mute and Important Records for the past decade. Balancing dark ambience with smokey, pulsing rhythms, his compositions are perfectly restrained, textured and mesmeric. In 2021, in collaboration with boutique synth builders Make Noise, Cortini released his own, custom designed, semi-modular synth, Strega (Italian for ‘witch’). That same year, he used Strega to build his latest full length, Scuro Chiaro (Mute), which Pitchfork described as “pitched somewhere between purgatory and the planetarium […] consistently managing to thrill and surprise”. Throughout his shadowy rise to fame, Cortini has collaborated with the likes of Lawrence English, Daniel Avery and Merzbow (to name a few).

 

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Chicago Reader – Composer Alessandro Cortini brings his elegantly uncanny synth sounds to Epiphany

Pitchfork – How Alessandro Cortini Distilled His Haunting Aesthetic Into an Unconventional Synthesizer

Flaunt – Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini | Illusion of Time