Gigi Masin

Venice and the radio

Gigi Masin was born in Venice on 24 October 1955 and still lives and works there. As a boy he went out on the water with his parents and swam in the small canals, and he remembers the city of those years as a place of a silence now hard to find anywhere. At eleven, the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations felt to him like a window opening. At twelve he was given a radio and spent his nights on Radio Luxembourg, and from then on he wanted to broadcast.

By the mid-1970s he was a DJ on Italy's free radio stations, hosting shows that ran late into the night. Around the age of twenty he worked with tape at RAI in Venice, where he learned to make loops on Studer machines. From the late 1970s he built sound collages for Venetian theatre from two turntables and records by Penderecki, Ligeti and Maderna, and composed for RAI documentaries. Ligeti and Penderecki reached him before Eno or Harold Budd did.

My heart is the heart of a radio DJ.

Gigi Masin, 2026

Wind

In 1985 he took a job with the Italian postal service, which gave him the time and the money to make Wind. He had found a Korg Poly-800 in a local shop while looking for an acoustic guitar, and the album grew out of experiments with it, after a holiday in Sardinia at the end of a relationship. Made with Alessandro Monti and a few brass players in a month or two, without overdubs, it was in Masin's words a photograph of a moment. The opening track is Call Me.

Five hundred numbered copies were pressed in 1986, and none was sold. He gave them away at a few small concerts and to friends, and some people rang his doorbell to ask for one. Magazine reviews were poor, but a local radio broadcast in 1988 had listeners phoning in for hours. Masin has called the record more honest than beautiful.

Clouds

A demo tape sent to the Brussels label Sub Rosa led to Les Nouvelles Musiques de Chambre, Volume 2 in 1989. The label paired Venice with London: Masin filled one side with a suite of eight Venetian pieces, among them Clouds, and Charles Hayward of This Heat took the other. In 1991 he made The Wind Collector with Monti for the Divergo label. Then he stepped back to raise a family and keep his post office job, which he held for about two decades, while his theatre and radio work continued into the mid-1990s.

Clouds travelled without him. To Rococo Rot sampled it heavily and without credit on Die Dinge des Lebens in 1999, Björk's 2002 single It's in Our Hands is built on it, and Post Malone's Big Lie (2016) contains an interpolation of it. Masin was upset at first that others were profiting from his work, and later amused and proud.

Rediscovery

He released Lontano in 2001, and later The Last DJ (2008) and Infanthree (2010) on Laverna. A high tide in Venice destroyed his equipment, his tapes, his archive and the last copies of Wind, and pushed him toward computers. Then Jamie Tiller of Red Light Records in Amsterdam came across Wind while researching Italian electronic music. Masin sent around eighty tracks and insisted on meeting the people behind Music From Memory in person, and in February 2014 the label released Talk to the Sea, a compilation of work from 1985 to 2010.

The same year he formed Gaussian Curve with Jonny Nash and Young Marco and made Hoshi with Tempelhof. In 2015 he reissued Wind himself on The Bear On The Moon because second-hand copies had become too expensive. In April 2016 he opened NTS Radio's fifth-birthday week at Cafe OTO in London.

Later work

Calypso (2020), on the R&S imprint Apollo, was built from warm sounds looped into short tape pieces and used the myth of Ulysses as a mirror. The Vahine EP (2022) is dedicated to his wife, who died after a long illness. He made Dolphin (2023) and The Fish Factory Sessions (2024) with Greg Foat, and in May 2026 released Movement on Sacred Bones, his first solo full-length since Calypso. Oneohtrix Point Never, Devendra Banhart and Caroline Polachek are among his admirers.

In 2026 he joined the Numero Group, which is reissuing Wind for its fortieth anniversary, and on 15 October 2026 a trio led by Masin plays Wind, reimagined for piano, bass, trumpet and electronics, at the Biennale Musica in Venice.