Luigi Maria Mennella

I approached the piano aged 7 and since then I have never stopped playing anything – between instruments and musical genres – that allowed me to translate the emotion of my inner world into music, over time flowing into a great passion for cinema. Similarly, I’m passionate about the non-canonical use of the voice and studied experimental singing, but also lyrical singing with the soprano Lucia Stanescu (Conservatory “P. Mascagni”, Leghorn). Starting from the early 90s, with “F.ormal L.ogic D.ecay” project I moved my sound research along parallel expressive channels; each represented by a specific solo project and characterized by sound / cultural references. E.g. as “En Velours Noir” introduces a very personal introspective and melancholic reinterpretation of orchestral tango, credited by some as “dark tango”.

I moved inside the underground music sector in other fields as well, both as a fan (e.g. music editor in the 90s), and as a professional, as a graphic-designer (specialized in Manchester in Adobe products), illustrator for some labels, small underground record producer or technical supervisor.

I attended specialization seminars in soundtracking / creating music for images with Maestro Riccardo Giagni, but in particular Stefano Caprioli and Leonardo Pieri (whom I thank) who encouraged me to move definitively towards cinematic / stage sounds. This part of my musical creativity increasingly present in my production, in recent years has emerged with greater force [eg. the recent “Aes Grave” for the “Furvus” ancient / epic music project] to represent for me an ideal point of convergence and artistic fulfillment. From 2017, with the award-winning medium-length film “Un Padre” (by Roberto Gneo, with whom I had previously collaborated) my new activity of soundtracks composer officially begins. Inclined both to a ‘traditional’ and contemporary / experimental compositional approach, I also deal with sound design (with a preference for subtractive synthesis and the occasional use of self-built or modified electro-acoustic instruments) and vocal research aimed at overcoming Western vocal hypertrophy (frequent in my works poly-timbric singing and harmonic singing inserts, supraglottic sounds and other phonation techniques often masked by a mix careful to harmonize the voice as an instrument).

My artistic education is completed by the study of film direction (degree obtained at the historic School of Cinema Immagina in Florence) which I perceived as a decisive step both to broaden the spectrum of my expressive needs and to establish a more transparent and synergistic dialogue with any director you want to collaborate with me, united by a genuine love and now greater technical awareness of everything that gravitates around the creation of a film. At the same time, I began to move in this sector also in other fields of pre and post-production (sound engineer, boom operator, foley artist, sound edit, re-recording mixer, etc) and I returned after years to ‘officially’ deal with film criticism (reopening a blog with a somewhat personal and unconventional format and which is receiving visits from all over the world).

I work independently in my studio “Opificio Entropico” using both analog / acoustic / vintage and digital instruments, with particular attention to new emulation technologies.

My profile covers a range of plays / influences that today allow me to provide soundtracks for a fairly broad spectrum of musical tastes / orders; and my discography freely moves between musique concréte and power-electronics, between ambient and krautrock, from rock to grindcore, passing through industrial music, synth pop, jazztronics, IDM, medieval music, folk, neoclassical, gothic / dark wave, ritual , music therapy and of course classical and jazz.

Simply… music is my life. Then, the life of a musician is not simple, but that’s another story…

Last but not least, “L’ Entropiste” is the pseudonym I have chosen to channel all the energy spent on my artistic and communicative activities, almost as if to measure and control the disorder (emotional, intellectual, cognitive, etc) of me, a modern man inside an ancient system . It is precisely the entropy released from the physical sphere (think of Claude Shannon’s information theory) or traced back to its semantic root (in ancient Greek ἐν/‘en’ – inside + τροπή/‘tropè’ – transformation) that this moniker is inspired by.