About Me

My life has always been about music and sound.
I started taking piano lessons when I was 8, then moved on to playing guitar and bass in school bands (exploring many genres from rock to blues and punk), but my personal revolution happened towards the end of the 90’s when hard-disk recording became reality.

After I assembled my first pc I dived into the possibilities of working with midi and virtual instruments; while I was finishing high school, choosing a college education that involved art and multimedia seemed the only logical consequence of the need to follow my passion.
I quickly started experimenting with sounds, crossing barriers between styles, always looking for unusual sonic solutions.

I begun working professionally as a music producer with the studio Bliss Corporation, collaborating with Gabry Ponte (Eiffel65), DJs From Mars and Dari amongst the others.

In the meantime, I started an international project called The Mainstream, inspired by the connections of the upcoming social network Myspace, through which I would keep in touch with musicians and rappers from all over the world; this allowed me to create a unique sound made of folk acoustic elements and electronic hip hop. I managed to produce three albums over seven years with our independent label and in 2010 a song named ‘Birds’ hit national radios over Germany, giving us the chance to tour around Europe as well as China, California and South America.

After 2010 I decided to dig deeper inside electronic music, sharpening my skills in composition and production, fascinated by the possibilities that the DAW (digital audio workstation) could give me in editing and manipulating sound.
At first I focused on sampling acoustic instruments (the ones I usually played live) building my own libraries within Logic’s sampler EXS24; following the example of artists like Gotye and Four Tet, I moved away more and more from the traditional concept of arrangement, aware that the only real boundaries I needed to respect were the laws of physics that impose a certain balance between low, mid and high frequencies as well as the stereo panorama.

Beside the studio work I decided to bring my compositions live with the project Carnival, restructuring my technical setup around small and portable devices and especially developing a keyboard technique to perform on an iPad running through digital processors (which I still do today with the italian superband Rezophonic).

The study of sonic manipulation led me to soundtrack compositions of all sorts, mostly for visual applications on both artistic and commercial works.
As I started freelance collaborations with local renown producers I felt the need of dealing with sound out of the music field and into the sound design concept.

I decided to move out of my hometown, Turin, to attend Event Horizon school in Milan, specialized in arts for cinema and videogames.
I learned how to step out of the linear concept to program procedural arrangements that could fit a 360 degrees virtual environment based on the user experience, for both gaming and virtual reality applications.

Since 2017 then I've been working on sound for video, be it experimental on-screen performances or more commonly brand/corporate storytelling; back in Turin, I've established connections with big local agencies (LMC Vision, LittleBull/Armando Testa, MyBossWas, Indaco) to which I provide location sound recording, sound design, post- production and final mix (both stereo and surround formats), mostly for popular platforms like Sky, DAZN, AmazonPrime and Netflix.

I still enjoy working on movies (short and feature) here and there, when I happen to be in charge of the overall sound from the shooting to the mix.

Lately, Erik Piepenburg of The New York Times wrote this ending for his review of the horror movie 'Sound Of Silence' by T3 directors Antonaci, Mandalà, Lascar (XYZ Films):
"Antonaci's tenebrous cinematography forces you to keep an eye on what lurks in the shadows that darken almost every scene, and it's a thrill. But it's Federico Malandrino's sound design that really hit me in the face. Watch with the volume cranked."