After our I DIEMM experience Maicol and I decided to return to one of our favorite musical genres, progressive rock. Still inspired by our last experience, we started to write new songs, looking for musicians to make a new line up. We found friends who we had the pleasure to know already and to have played with before. Matteo Bordoni on bass guitar and Mattia Ciuffoli on drums. They had the right attitude, they wanted to grow, both individually and as a band. What about the singer? We liked the idea of having both male and female voices, so that we could choose the voice according to the type of song. Thus Valentina Tontini joined the band, and I took on the role of singer myself for the first time. We found the right chemistry, so LOST ATOM was born.
As I already said, we wanted to create unconventional songs, progressive rock and psychedelia, with lyrics in both Italian and English. I could make my contribution as the male voice and Valentina, with her ability to sing in the classical lyrical register with a pop approach, was ideal as the female one. That gave the band even more opportunity to experiment and allowed us to take our compositions in any direction that we wanted. I didn’t find it very easy being lead vocalist and playing the guitar contemporaneously. It was too much for me at the time, partly because I had to become more confident with singing, and partly because the structures and arrangements of the songs were quite complex. So most of the songs were composed to be sung by Valentina and I did just the choruses, that was enough!
Having created more than a dozen songs in a year, we were ready to play live. And we did, for a couple of years. We also had the opportunity to play in progressive festivals with bands like Le Orme, Il Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso, Premiata Forneria Marconi, Il Mito and New Trolls. Man, it was amazing.
At the same time, we decided to record our stuff in the studio . We did, but the insufficiency of the budget forced us to use non-professional equipment. It wasn’t easy at all, our inexperience showed. In fact, that was my first experience of spending a lot of time in the studio. I found it so cool but the process took so long to complete. When the album was finally released, we had already decided to call it a day. The feeling was that we had said all we had to say as a band in that one record so, unwillingly, we split up and this exciting experience came to an end. Finally in 2014, the album was released as a limited edition with the homonymous name, LOST ATOM. You can hear a preview of some songs below.
Fun fact: the cover is a picture by my uncle Mario Magnanelli, that he painted in 1969.
On a positive note, this decision to split up left room for new inspiration and new projects..
