Early years
Born in Milan, Marco Galletti was raised from age six in Alessandria (a small town in Northern Italy), where he discovered his interest in music. He began with piano but soon developed a specific interest for the organ (classic and electric).
He still considers himself basically ‘an organist’, as he thinks that digital audio workstations can be seen as sort of ‘modern organs’, with improved capabilities of sound emulation and design. Since the beginning Marco Galletti enjoyed playing classical music (J.S. Bach above all) and listening to rock music. As he said: ‘At the beginning of the 70s some specific events definitely changed my perception of music. I still remember perfectly the first time I watched Pink Floyd at Pompei in 1973, the first time I listened to Selling England by The Pound in 1974, the first time I listened to Trans Europe Express in 1977’.
As a matter of facts his music has always followed the 3 directions suggested by those experiences: the attention to sound design inspired by Pink Floyd, the armonic-melodic-rhytmic research inspired by Genesis and the attention to the new technologies inspired by Kraftwerk.
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The Arcansiel period
After some initial experiences in local bands Marco Galletti created Arcansiel in 1985, initially as a Genesis cover band. 80s were a bad decade for rock music, it seemed that playing an instrument well or executing a not 4/4-oriented piece of music became a great problem for a musician. Everyone payed attention mainly to’The Look’. Your haircut was more important than your sound. The Arcansiel project was a proud reaction to all this stuff. They sounded old and outdated, but they did what they really liked.
With no great ambition of success and very limited means the band self-produced their first album (Four Daisies), recorded in a few weeks between the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988. The album was recorded on a 4-track device and initially published on vinyl only, all songs were composed by Marco Galletti. It had an unexpected success as right in that moment an international ‘new progressive’ movement was rising, expecially in countries like Germany, Holland, France, UK, Japan and USA.
Due to the diffusion of the self-produced album a contract with a label (Contempo Records) was signed in 1989. This led to the production of the second album (Stillsearching) and the re issue of Four Daisies in CD format. Stillsearching was recorded at the end of 1989 in a 16-track studio and the sound quality was far better. Even in this case Marco Galletti composed all the songs, including the initial 20min suite I’m Still Searching.
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Solo career
At the end of 1990 Marco Galletti left Arcansiel due to ever growing non-musical work commitments. Only later he tried to develop two solo musical projects.
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Boxes For Foxes (1994) can be considered as the foundation of the ‘musical objects’ theory, even if in a still embryonic and unsystematic state. The album leaves behind the 70s-inspired atmospheres and sounds of the Arcansiel period and takes in account the usage of technology in a totally self-developed music. As Four Daisies it was recorded in a home studio with very limited recording capabilities and should be seen more like a ‘demo-album’ than a finite work.
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La luce che illumina i sogni (2005) is another self-produced work but, in the new decade, it takes the advantages offered by Digital Audio Workstations. Here the progressive-derived harmonic progressions are mixed with sounds and inspirations derived from a certain American Minimalism. The final aim was to create a completely ‘personal’ musical style, very difficult to categorize with a ‘label’.
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After these two works Marco Galletti interrupted his musical projects as it was clear to him that a serious development of his ideas needed a full-time approach to music. Finally only from the half of 2023 Marco Galletti restarted from the point where he was interrupted, this time with a full-time approach and a long-term musical project.
