Giovanni Venosta

Water messages

Giovanni Venosta was born on October 8, 1961 in Udine, graduated in piano in 1983 and lives in Milan. He is mainly a film composer, with sixteen feature films and shorts, documentaries, dance and theater music, and works with piano, synthesizer, sampler, tape and electronic effects. With Roberto Musci, a Milan field recordist who studied African, Indian and Eastern music on travels between 1974 and 1985, he makes sample collage built mostly from ethnic music, found sounds and live improvisation, per an NTS biography sourced to Last.fm.

Their first album as a duo, Water Messages on Desert Sand (Recommended Records, 1987), draws on the soundtracks of two video installations they made with Studio Azzurro in 1985 and 1986, "Storie per/corse" and "La terra del cielo". Urban and Tribal Portraits followed in 1989 on ReR Megacorp, the compilation Messages and Portraits in 1990 (reissued on CD in 2018), and A Noise a Sound in 1992. Venosta also made Losing the Orthodox Path (1997, Les Disques Victo) and a re-score of Dreyer's Vampyr (1998) with Musci and Chris Cutler, and has scored films by Silvio Soldini, whose Pane e tulipani earned a Ciak d'oro in 2000. He teaches film music at the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan and, in 2024, received the Kikito d'oro for best music at the Gramado Film Festival.