He still keeps the robot figurines from his childhood. Now you can hear them on a record
The master of hypnotic techno sampled someone else’s song for the first time in his career. It turned out to be a theme from a Japanese cartoon he watched as a kid.
Donato Dozzy — “Astro”
Italian producer Donato Dozzy has announced a new album — Astro, a record on which he weaves his own synthesizer sound together with childhood memories. It lands on November 20 via Berlin’s Tresor.
The album was detailed on the release page of the Tresor label.
The strange part is where the inspiration came from. Dozzy is known for deep, almost trance-like productions built on synthesized sound, yet the push behind the new album came from Japanese robot cartoons he was obsessed with in the late 1970s.
Where the sound came from
Back then a wave of Japanese series about giant robots swept over Italian kids. Every episode was dubbed into Italian and given its own musical theme, released on seven-inch records.
That, according to the label’s press text, sparked two of his lifelong passions — collecting vinyl and vinyl robot figurines, which he still carefully keeps at home.
“With Astro, Donato Dozzy pulls together threads in his life: the warp of music and synthesisers intertwining with the weft of childhood memories,” reads the Tresor description.
Last year, for the first time in his life, he sampled someone else’s song for his own work — that very first Japanese theme he once owned on record. That is how the title track Astro was born, released as the album’s lead single.
The album runs to seven tracks and comes as a double LP. It is a rare case in which abstract electronica rests not on an idea but on a concrete thing from childhood — a cartoon soundtrack.
Who is Donato Dozzy
Donato Dozzy is one of the most respected Italian masters of hypnotic, dub-inflected techno, whose work long ago moved beyond the dance floor toward sound meditations.
Releasing it on Tresor is symbolic in itself: the Berlin label is one of the pillars of European techno culture, and an album about an Italian childhood arrives right at its heart.
Earlier we wrote about how a show by Anyma was cancelled in Istanbul — another landmark figure in contemporary techno.
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