Federico De Caroli, who records as Deca, has spent forty years refusing to choose between experiment and form. His new album takes on the machine age.
SAVONA, Italy — In June 2025, Federico De Caroli released an album called Neuronte, a word he made himself. It joins the Greek neuron, nerve, to the participle ending -onte, and it names a condition: a being is a neuronte when it undergoes sensory experience without physical contact with the material world, feeling bodily sensation without using the senses. Anyone asleep and dreaming is temporarily in that state.
Seven tracks, roughly forty minutes, built around what he has described as an interest in robotics, alchemy, telepathy and dream. It arrived as he passed the four-decade mark in a career that has never quite fit the categories available to it.
De Caroli was born in Savona in 1964 and started piano at eleven. He registered as a composer with SIAE, the Italian authors’ society, in 1983, bought a Roland JX-3P, and three years later put out Alkaid under the name Deca. More than twenty albums followed, moving through cosmic synthesiser music, industrial, dark ambient and, more recently, solo piano.
Those first records have since become collectors’ items. Synthetic Lips, pressed in 1987 in an edition of roughly 100 copies and reissued in 2016, and the 1986 debut Alkaid have both changed hands second-hand at median prices above $200. On Discogs, about eight times as many collectors list each record as wanted as own a copy.
His work has also reached wide audiences. He has written for RAI, Italy’s national broadcaster, and for theatre, ballet, video art and multimedia projects. His catalogue is published by Sonor Music Editions in Rome and licensed internationally through APM Music, and his pieces turn up regularly in documentaries.
The recognition, when it came, came from an unlikely quarter. The critic Piero Scaruffi, not a man given to generosity, placed Deca’s 2002 album Simbionte at number 43 on his list of the best ambient records ever made. The Treccani encyclopaedia, Italy’s most established reference work, carries an entry on him.
None of which has made him an easy fit among his peers.
“In experimental and avant-garde circles I have often been criticised for my formal consistency and underlying musicality,” De Caroli said. “I have looked for a constant compromise between exploration and style, one that avoids gratuitous provocation in favour of works with a coherent sense of purpose.”
That is a real disagreement, not a modest one. Much of European experimental music since the 1970s has treated melody and structure as compromises to be escaped. De Caroli kept them, and took the criticism.
He has also built a framework around the idea. In February 1992 he published the manifesto of Distonirismo, a contraction of distorsione onirica, dream distortion, which holds that dreaming is not a supplement to waking perception but a level of consciousness with equal standing. He arrived at it without leaning on Freud, Jung or the Surrealists, and it has organised his output ever since, across music, painting and fiction. He holds a degree in literature, has published novels, exhibited paintings on alchemical themes, and once ran the eighteenth-century Teatro Sacco in his home city.
Neuronte came out on Atom Institute and drew a favourable notice from the Italian music site OndaRock, whose reviewer described a turn away from industrial texture toward something colder and more cosmic, with Vangelis and John Carpenter audible in the background. Sissi Kia, a longtime artistic collaborator who has lent her speaking voice to earlier records and works with him on photography and video, appears again. Every one of the seven tracks has its own film, shot in black and white or with the colour pushed toward sepia and blue.
For a composer who has spent forty years insisting that experiment and coherence are not opposites, an album about the boundary between people and machines is a reasonable place to be standing.