HOLOGRAM BOY - SINAPSI ATTIVE w/Interview
HOLOGRAM BOY is a virtual reality project featuring the artist’s “cybernetic hologram”. Prior to rebranding as HOLOGRAM BOY, this artist spent decades as a jazz musician; when the lockdown struck the world, he fell in love with virtual reality, put on his trademark wig and became HOLOGRAM BOY. Today we are excited to share our interview with HOLOGRAM BOY as well as our thoughts on his single “SINAPSI ATTIVE” which features Miss Virtuality!
“SINAPSI ATTIVE” is electrifying in nature, featuring a powerful instrumental track that draws you in from the beginning and a tantalizing vocal performance that holds your attention throughout the song’s duration. The way in which the instrumental’s rhythmic nature blends with the vocals gives the song some brilliant texture, rounding out the melodic work in a way that allows this song to easily get stuck in your head. Truly a pulse-pounding experience, “SINAPSI ATTIVE” will leave you addicted to its electrifying atmosphere - and it will make you want to hear more from HOLOGRAM BOY.
Now let’s jump into the interview!
Thanks for being with us today!
Thanks a lot for having me, it’s a real pleasure to meet you!
You've been a music artist for many years. Can you tell us a bit about your early experiences in music?
Ok, so let’s do the boring part: since I was born, I was all the time exposed to Jazz music, to Charlie Parker, Miles and Louis Armstrong thanks to my mom and my uncle Mariano. Then in my childhood I studied piano with our neighbor at the time in Rome, the fine pianist Alberta. I have clearly sculpted in my brain the sound image of her touch on the piano, a touch that in my whole life I then only found in the hands of the legendary Barry Harris. Then happened that at my 14th birthday my father asked me: “Do you want the electric bass or the motorcycle (the Italian classic “Motorino Califfo”)? And guess… I made the wrong decision 😊. So I started to play, and, as was very shy and introvert, music allowed me to be with other people, it was my ticket to escape from loneliness. So at sixteen I did my first paid gig and then I repeated this scheme for 20 years, until the pandemic.
You only recently took on the name HOLOGRAM BOY. What led to your decision to start releasing music as HOLOGRAM BOY?
During the first day of the lockdown I tought “this is all over, finished”. I always played music for social reasons, I don’t play for myself, I always played for the people. So I rewired my brain completely, also thanks to the Oculus by Mark Zuckerberg, and discovered new worlds and a new self. This is why my name now is Hologram Boy, to stress the point that now we are all pixels in small screens and I want to symbolize to my friends that you can always do Something-else and be Something-else. And specifically, in 5 years, when the transition from Facebook to Meta will be completed, we all will be just holograms; we have now a 5-year-window to enjoy the last crumbs of humanity. So, to answer your question, Hologram Boy is a symptom of the pandemic and a piece of the mosaic of cultural decay that is going on.
What are your current goals for your music and career?
I guess you noticed by now: Sinapsi Attive has become a world success. I hope to continue, song after song to match this incredible success. I’ll be featuring the super-great Miss Virtuality, as well as other incredible artists, like Lady Fluo, with the same magi-mercurial vibe in their voice. And I don’t have specific goals, I just watch what happens and react to what happens. Now I just do music without expectations and it is very liberating to be free from the aesthetic-cage. But I have a wish to bring some color in todays world that is so dark and depressing, and I would like to serve as an example that is possible to change in surprising and unexpected ways (just like Miles Davis did), because this is what will happen to us all when the Great Revolution will be completed.
We took a listen to your debut single "Sinapsi attive". Can you share some information about the writing and recording process for this song?
I am in a period of my life where I am very open and creation simply flows trough the Semiosphere, I just accept it. I finally feel free from any restriction and I am mature enough that I don’t need people’s approval, so “Sinapsi Attive” is the result of a naïve and unconventional process. It took 3 months of work, because I wanted to explore and learn, and then synthetized the process in simple elements. Just pure fun, and I hope you can see that in the music video, my Sicilian humour is all over the place and this is my response to italian influencers like Fedez or Chiara Ferragni, they are all clean and shining, and very rich, powerful and everything perfect. I wanted to show the reality, the sleaziness of my surroundings, of normal people with little money and little power. I shoot the video all with my crappy phone. I wanted to be “cruel”, in the meaning that Antonin Artaud gave to the term, and “graceful”, in the meaning that Alexander Lowen gave to the term.
What's next for HOLOGRAM BOY?
Me and Miss Virtuality are working on a very mysterious track that is self-creating. We used a fair deal of Artificial Intelligence on “Sinapsi Attive”, but for this track we have a dedicated laptop that we keep in the fridge that is now working non-stop and that is narrowing day after day the Kaos into the human category of “music poetry”. We’ll see what will remain in our hard drive. Can’t wait for it. We are doing what John Cage already did, but in an occult and contemporary-tech driven way, our crazy contradiction is “we choose what is random”. Ah, and I decided to sell the precious and unique piece of digital silence NFT that you can find here: https://opensea.io/HologramBoy - I hope you don’t mind this advertising 😊, just to tell you, this is what Cage did with “4’33” in 1952, I do this in 2021 as a NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. The price is very low and accessible (1ETH) because I think it is a digital and philosophical asset that it’s easy to speculate on, so my earnings will came from that 10% I own as minter on all future transactions. I can see this go big in the Metaverse. So, would you like to own the digital silence right now and get rich in 5 years?
Thank you!
Thank you so much for your time, it was a pleasure talking with you and Merry Christmas!
After our interview, I feel like we understand HOLOGRAM BOY a lot better and have some great insight into this artist and his future; I found it especially fitting that an artist fascinated with virtual reality and the Metaverse would get into NFTs! You can keep up with HOLOGRAM BOY through his website and we have “SINAPSI ATTIVE” embedded below via YouTube! Be sure to give this track a listen and also keep an eye out for HOLOGRAM BOY’s upcoming collab with phantasmagoric artist Lady Fluo!
