Michele Menini is an Italian composer and sound designer.
As a child, on road trips with his parents, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles and John Lee Hooker would play on the car stereo.
After his Bontempi keyboards and the recorder at middle school, he learnt to play the guitar, his first “real” instrument, to which he became attached for many years.
Growing up, he listened to Nirvana, Metallica, Radiohead and Massive Attack, as well as singers and bands from the past like Jimi Hendrix and The Doors.
Thanks to his uncle’s record collection, he discovered various Pop and Rock icons of the 70s and 80s along with experimental and avant-garde music like John Cage and Brian Eno’s.
With the beginning of the new millennium, he became passionate about electro music, from Daft Punk to Aphex Twin, about Jazz with Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Monk, Duke Ellington and about Funk with James Brown.
So he decided to study Electronic Music, taking up the piano and the synthesiser, unaware of how much this choice would affect his artistic path.
From then on, he devoted himself to creating music on the computer.
Inveterate cinema-lover, his debut as a film composer was for Filippo Meneghetti’s documentary “Maistrac”.
After which Luca Immesi and Giulia Brazzale commissioned the soundtrack of their first feature film “Ritual – A Psychomagic Story”, inspired by the Psychomagic cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky, who did a cameo in the film.
He also composed the music of Immesi and Brazzale’s second film “The Awful Wars”, a surreal dark fairy tale on wars and memory.
In 2018, he was asked to make a Dubstep track for a scene in Ivan Silvestrini’s “Arrivano i prof”, with Claudio Bisio.
In 2019, the music of the short film “The Beast” by Filippo Meneghetti, won him the award for “Best Soundtrack” at the Lago Film Fest.
The film scores he wrote for “Deux”/”Two of Us”, an extraordinary film about love with Martine Chevalier and Barbara Sukova, directed by Filippo Meneghetti, showcase Michele Menini’s sensitivity and composing skills. The film competed in numerous international festivals, won several prizes, it was nominated for the Golden Globe “Best Foreign Language Film” Award 2021 and it was France’s submission to the Oscars.
Eclecticism and timbre research define Michele Menini’s music, which might skip from one genre to another, just like it might keep to classic standards.
His approach is pure, spontaneous, but not naive.
“Music is the only art form that allows a direct, almost objective interpretation. Its shape might be abstract, but when it comes to emotions, it becomes figurative with extraordinary precision, so much so that it gives us goose bumps without even touching us. It’s a universal language that everyone can understand without having to know the language.”
M. M.