Hox Vox is a solo project started in '79, dead in '90 and born again in late 2008.

I had an acustic guitar, a mouthorgan, a flute and a cassette recorder during '77, so I started first experiments in the wake of Pere Ubu and Residents, my first cult bands, with predictably ridiculous results. Things went slowly better despite I was totally self-taught, no musicians in my family nor between friends. I was drawing a comic story about a mysterious Hoxerijo living planet in '77: the main character, except for the planet himself, was called Capt. Everybody, frendly called "the Hox" for being 24/7 in patrol service (a stakanovist druggy policeman). The nickname passed to me, and started to add a logo "Hox Vox" on my musicassettes , meaning that despite every cassette had a different band name (the Mockers, the Skyzophrenes, Gunshot and many others) they were made by "Hox".

When I started high school I met Marco Bianchi (same classroom), we became soon great friends and started to think to make a band. He decided to study drums. I went for bass and keyboards, but putting less effort (In that days I preferred to make animation and illustration). After a few time he had enough to wait for me to play seriously, so joined Death in Venice.

Anyway, we continued in his spare time to make loosely music during '80s, with the nicknames Hoxerijo (shortened Hox) and Mark Winnipeg. First years (until 1984) with the goth/dark new wave Gunshot Nucleus, which went on as a duo until 1982 when the cover "In Your House" was selected to the final regional round of "Rock Italiano mette i Denti" Contest. During last months and beyond I was seriously knocked out so band turned to Bianchi (drums) Sebastian Russo of Death in Venice (vocals), Alberta Marchiori (bass) and a guy (whose name I don't remember) at the keyboards. We classified 3rd, paired with another band: first two went to national finals, so we were eliminated and band went back again to duo when I was healthy again.

Two years after dark electronic new wave really didn't excited us anymore, and honestly me made a lot of music but, mostly, complete songs (or cassette) made all by me or by him. The problem was in my interested for kraftwerk meet residents music, while he was between Blancmange or a cleaned version of Suicide.

We tried a new approach as an avant-new wave duo called SlideStraviati, but it produced only a couple of musicassettes. We gave up to play together when I sadly got drafted (it was mandatory in that times).

A typical promo backup :-D, The Unsung Brain Tannery by SlideStraviati and The Church by Mark Winnipeg.

After one year of suffer I finally ceased to lose my time with idiots, and I bought an Amiga 500. I discovered trackers world, conceptually more oriented to programmers than musicians (you had to insert numeric values to achieve fx) but very interesting and more cyborgish than dealing with Cubase 1.0 on Atari, with a strangley more accented interaction with software... same difference existing between windows and linux. In second one you can deeply put your hands. First one is bulletproof from any modification.

There were a lot of limitations: MED, my first tracker, could manage only 4 tracks. This means 4 mono instruments, two on left channel and two on right one. Or two stereo instruments, or one stereo and two mono. With that I made first 5 songs of Eight-Bit Deboned (all lost, unfortunately); then I discovered Octalyzer who managed 8 tracks (!) at the cost of a lower quality, and had more commands and features. Very buggy indeed, I lost a 23 minutes song after two weeks of work (I was too lame to know the word "backup", but after that I learnt it). I also used OctaMED (evolution of MED tracker) for a few time after releasing Eight-Bit Deboned.

I released Eight-Bit Deboned like an hacker demo, on a floppy with an amigados spartan interface (you inserted the number of song listed and a macro loaded and played the song by a mod player, or the whole playlist). Commercially speaking was like doin' nothing: few people had an Amiga, and nobody in musical magazines (I imagine them trying the floppy on a normal PC and throwing it away, saying "it's damaged"). No internet in '89, so I gave up with music and went for animation and illustration.

In october 2008 I recovered part of that record (floppy) and uploaded it to Last.FM. Just for fun, as songs were almost all damaged and missing parts (or with too low volumes). But there was people interested in it, so I polished off webs from my bass, searched for music tools suitable to composition and mix, found quite satisfying Ableton Live and composed my second record as Hox Vox: Outskirt. I released it one week before Christmas 2008, which is the date of my 2nd beginning.

The basement of my work is R.I.O./progressive, with a clear obsession for not-proper use of instruments, song structures and amplification.
There are plenty of bizarre twists on any kind of genre: caribbean, post-rock, avantgarde, jazz or gamelan themes. Rhythms can unexpectedly vary, they're not tied to themes (nor the reverse).

I'm searchin' for combinations of many different elements by a common factor. It's not revolutionary, we've seen lot of people working on this during decades. But that's why I think I'm in that vein, just a little more electronic - and sometimes more listenable - than what's usually R.I.O / avantprog area.

I can't stand listening to same kind of music for hours, or it's very unusual; I get bored and any particular kind of music lose strenght when listened compulsively. After some time even Zappa is boring.

So maybe that's one reason why I often change music ambients. But a stronger reason is that music is a language, and languages are more effective if they are richer, supported by more terms. I find very difficult describe in music a vast array of moods using a single genre, especially because almost every genre is tied to a particular mood. But I find also very funny turn reggae to violence, or funky to 5/4 landscapes, or alternate in a song a metal mayhem bridge with a synth pop hook.

I few words, a richer language is not used to make a pompous speech, but a bizzarre tale where elements are not necessarily congruent, like in Dada and Surrealism movements, or Andrea Pazienza's text-image partnership deconstruction. Actually it's something I could define as generally art rock, or more specifically dadaprog rock.

In the first half of 80's second-hand synthesizers prices were particularly affordable, thanks to flourishing synth-driven New Wave scene. First I bought an Electro Harmonix Mini-synthesizer from Dimitri Golowaskin, an italian avant-garde/ambient artist. It was a two-octaves touch keyboard: keys were just drawn on a touch-sensible plastic strip, like a laptop touchpad. Very basic controls on A-D-S-R, a couple of effects plus a detuner. That was all. I made with it neckbreaking and absurd solos, having no keys to press and relative return. Just skate on fingers all around the plastic touch-sensible trip. Quite annoying, after a while.

Later I bought a Yamaha CS-15 synth from Frigidaire Tango lead singer's shop: some steps further, after the really basic mini-synthesizer. It hadn't a sequencer, like the biggest brother CS-20, but they shared the same sound generation hardware. It was easy to produce sounds very similar to the ones of Residents or Pere Ubu's Allen Ravenstine, so I found it really sexy. The bad news were that after a few hours, even if you didn't touch anything, the sound mutated on his own. It's because this synt relied on valves & knots: no digital management means that a change of weather or moisture is enough to modify settings.

Searching for a solution about the lack of a sequencer, I tried a Roland Drumatix TR-606 which gave me Marco Bianchi. I connected its input to CS-15's output to obtain a sync with rhythm. Obviously I couldn't play CS-15 sounds with the drum machine, it simply applied a in-sync pulsing of the sound. I had to change the note by hand, so I ended using TR-606 as a drum machine and play the synth parts like a normal keyboard without connect them in any way.

With these machines, and a Hondo bass I had given, I played in SlidesTraviati and Gunshot Nucleus.

At the end of  80's came out Amiga 500: I mean, the best personal computer You could buy in that era to make graphics, animation, music. And playing videogames, of course. Atari ST had a better (not very much) MIDI management to link it to sampler, drum machines and keyboards. And Cubase, which didn't exist on Amiga: a serious problem to professional musicians. But Amiga won 10-1 on every other branch of multimedia: too far better in animation and graphics. No way out, I was for Amiga!

Eight-Bit Deboned was composed and played in 1989 using a tracker, (Oktalizer 1.0 on an Amiga 500) and a few samples token from Amiga magazines’ bonus disks and an Akai 900 sampler. The resulting sound reminds vaguely of Residents or Fred Frith.

At the beginning of 90's I gave up to play music, and I spent all of my free time in animation tasks. Since few time ago I'm slowly goin' back to play again. I bought a bass guitar, than a friend of mine gave me another one, I started to work on new material: I'm back, even if nobody cares.