A Chat With: Pancratio
An unpretentious chat with the Italian producer behind One Trip To Avyon & Korghettini project
Who puts together dope underground house productions, a nerdy passion for 2000s Korg machines, and an I don’t give a fuck attitude? Well, this question just sounds random but perfectly serves the purpose of introducing Pancratio. The Italian wonder-kid has been steadily gaining attention through a slamming series of hot production . Fan and quirky yet solidly deep - his music style plays around with house, techno, trance and tribal influences - a pure underground delight for the post-covid music specialities c-ravers.
Here, Henry Ivry catches up with Pancratio to discover more about the mysterious characters and learn about his latest and upcoming projects.
Listen as you read: previews for the latest Pancratio project, OTTA5 X Korghettini Electronics
Pancratio
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Pancratio 〰️
Can you describe your background a bit? How did you get into electronic music?
I’m a nerd :) I like synths and melodies and when I was a kid I used to listen to shitty eurodance tracks, Aphex and Green Day all day. Casual huh? I say no.
What was the scene like where you grew up in Italy? Were there particular DJs or clubs that were important to you, and influence your sound to this day?
Mmmh nope not really - I used to skip school to learn Ableton and do my thangs, I was 12. My mom wanted me to stay home! Arrgh.
“Basically I’m a mad kid looking to learn everything. Of course it’s pretentious and impossible”
The records you release seem to be about creating immersive worlds rather than just releasing a series of club tracks. Do you create narratives around your releases? How do you approach the production process? Maintaining certain themes is something you seem to encourage with your output.
By nature I can’t stay for too long on something, so during the years I learned to stick to some personal and sensible topics that influence me everyday and then they normally turn into music.
They call them dreams ✨
On that note, do you take a similar approach to how you DJ?
Follow the floooow :)))))
Pancratio in his natural habitat
From our understanding you are typically operating from your OTTA Research Lab, where you are producing, mixing and mastering but also teaching. What is that? Amd What made you move into the territories of engineering and teaching? Do you always work with certain genres or does it vary?
I’m a creative guy. I do everything I feel like doing. I’m constantly looking for something more to learn from the process and that ended up being sound processing, mixing, mastering, sound design and more. Basically I’m a mad kid looking to learn everything. Of course it’s pretentious and impossible, but i've collected a discrete amount of knowledge during the years that I now feel blessed to use to help other people in the process of making music.
Tell us about the Korghettini Electronics Series you are currently putting out? What are the ideas behind the series? How important are your Korg machines to your day to day studio time?
Appetite comes with eating - most of my ideas are born in the process - I just put them together and started to jam because they basically sounded crap compared to my vintage gear. I wanted to make less pretentious tracks for the dancefloor and use those little babies transversely. All of my instruments speak for themselves, none of them are more relevant than others in the ‘network’.
Many people were first introduced to you through the One Trip to Avyon project. Can you describe the ideas behind this project a bit more? And what you have coming up on the label?
First of all, I’m sorry for them... They really didn’t need another kid doing dance music, but I couldn’t resist - LoL - anyway I feel that all of us at the end want to leave something behind, as testimony of our passage on this complex world. As I said before I am constantly looking for something that nobody can reach, which I could describe as perfection or success. What that really means is that the journey on which you experience things and change, 'one trip to avyon’, I call my board diary, where the need to have a phisical object just gives me the opportunity to leave something for future generations and at the same time acts like my growth compass...
Some of your previous output on OTTA was with Giammarco Orsini, do you have a close relationship? How did it flow when working on a collaborative project? Are there other artists you often work with?
Nope, my creative process is strictly personal or restricted to people that I respect and that I know very well... Giammarco is one of my best friend and supporter since basically day zero. He has been a human and artistical inspiration so it felt very natural to just sit and create. Simone De Kunovich in another important part of my life and responsible for most of the cracks in my head but he always pushed me over my boundaries and i thank him very much for that... We did dozens of records together... OTTA is a crib for my musical and artistic relations and more collabs are to come, but ssshhhh!
“Looking around us and asking why we are here and how we can do better leads automatically to discovering new connections with things that are beyond what we can observe, at the gates of the perceptible. Spirituality is not the right word anymore.”
You recently put out a fantastic mix on the famous Nozoo series, you manage to maintain a particular vibe and energy throughout, did you have a certain idea in mind before setting out to do this?
To go back to the narrative thing, yes. It’s been actually my debut mix as Pancratio and I wanted to make something special for them. I’m a huge fan of early Italian tribal trance records and since I collected a few during the last couple of years, it just happened. I wanted to explore the idea of a world too damaged to be lived by human beings, where they were forced to go underground to survive, because the environment had become too uninhabitable. Music is now made with things like sticks, stones and plastic parts and its purpose is to keep hope alive... From my Insta post: “The dichotomy between anger for what is no more and the hope to get it back is the imaginary theme for the mix I have recorded” - Hey you, for more informations feel free to hit me with a message, but not for the tracklist :@
Your new records seem to have a lightness to them, something I'm tempted to call "spiritual"? It is refreshing to hear after being locked down for so long. How has the pandemic shifted your relationship to music? Would you say it had an effect on the music you were creating during the last years.
Looking around us and asking why we are here and how we can do better leads automatically to discovering new connections with things that are beyond what we can observe, at the gates of the perceptible. Spirituality is not the right word anymore and man, I’m a nerd - im in lockdown since day one :))))
