maurizio raiola

Forty-three years ago my first electric guitar arrived and the first group with school friends. We were in the middle of the post-punk, dark and new wave wave, but we came from another story: from the vinyls of Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Neil Young, pino daniele, central naples... An explosive encounter between what we had heard until then and everything new that was happening around us. KAOS & KRISI, VVALFA, XAMAX were some of the bands with whom, from 1982 to 1998, I wrote lyrics and music, experiencing the post-psychedelic, punk rock and dark scene of the Neapolitan underground. Since then I have never stopped writing. Over the years, hundreds of songs have been born, crossing very different genres: pop, indie, rock, reggaeton, operetta, ethnic music and Neapolitan tradition. For me, though, gender has never been the most important thing. The soul of a song counts. What matters is what he manages to convey, regardless of the musical language used. For this reason, over the years, I have also created listening groups in which I propose my unpublished songs without too many explanations, looking for a real confrontation with the listener. It's my way of understanding if what I write still manages to reach people, if a melody, a phrase or a story still manages to provoke an emotion. After more than forty years I continue to write with the same question I had when I picked up that first guitar.