If there is a legendary, truly “mythical” figure in the panorama of new Italian music, this is surely that of Lino Capra Vaccina, percussionist and composer.
Recognized by many as the figure behind Franco Battiato’s most innovative and experimental albums, Lino began his professional career at the dawn of the 1970s by founding with Walter Maioli the group Aktuala, considered by many critics to be the “highest” form of artistic expression in the entire Italian pop music scene.
After the first, unsurpassed album for Bla Bla Records Lino leaves the line-up to devote himself to the purity of klang, of sound. He collaborates with Juri Camisasca, with whom he will play on his debut album “La finestra dentro,” and with Franco Battiato with whom he works until the years of “Mondi Lontanissimi,” an album in which Capra Vaccina’s unmistakable metaphysical tablas draw on buried memories. With the two Lino founds another formation shrouded in the aura of myth, the Magnetic Chassis. Lino then lands his first solo album, “Antico Adagio,” which is included in the list of the ten best albums of all time by most music critics. It is an album that marks a new syncretism, a new poetics of sound, where percussion plays ancient roles, punctuating new dynamics and chiming the different pacing of tempos, Kronos and Aion. Lino then covered for Claudio Abbado the role of percussionist at the Filarmonica della Scala for many years, and in 2015 the album “Arcaico Armonico” and “Metafisiche del Suono” marked his return to the live and studio scene with distinguished guests.
He has collaborated live and in the studio with Keith and Julie Tippett, Paolo Tofani, Annie Barbazza, John Greaves, Markus Stockhausen, Evan Parker and many others. He has performed at Café Oto in London and at all major European alternative and contemporary music festivals.
In 2022, the album “Syncretic Modal” was released, already described by critics as a “milestone of contemporary minimalism.”