BIO

The project began in October 1997, when a group of music-loving friends started playing together, giving rise to free-form, psychedelic-tinged improvisations.

The original line-up, simply called Flavour, was made up of Francesco Francia on drums, Paolo Feliciotti on bass, Giovanni Armadoro on keyboards and Nicola Cruciani on guitar. 

The band played a handful of local shows and, in the meantime, wrote its first songs. 

The defining trait of this period is precisely its psychedelic and experimental approach to improvisation: both original material and covers were stretched into extremely long instrumental sessions.

The sonic snapshot that best captures this early phase is the album/bootleg I Maius MCMXCVIII, drawn from live shows, band rehearsals and a studio recording that closes the record. 

Originally saved on cassette tapes and later transferred to digital in 2001, the album was distributed in a handful of copies among friends and acquaintances, and initially carried the title ?Was it a cat i saW?.

After a few sporadic local performances, the band decided to break up around 2000, marking the end of the original project.

Between 2002 and 2004 the band made several attempts to get back together, but in the end it was Cruciani alone who carried the project forward, renaming it Flavour Sperimentale. 

This new phase began as a collaborative laboratory, at times shared with other artists over the web: numerous experiments emerged, many of them highly experimental and never officially released.

The first project to be published was ZU, an album built on studies and prepared-piano loops, shared on MySpace and met with very little success. 

By contrast, the original band's debut album found an unexpected following on the same platform, surpassing eighty thousand streams.

Around the same time, Cruciani — still using the Flavour name but adding the tag *Lab* — produced, together with other collaborators, a number of unofficial albums that appeared briefly online before being taken down.

In 2006 the second official Flavour Sperimentale project, Elektronische Musik, was released: still experimental in nature, but oriented — unlike *ZU* — toward more electronic textures, close in spirit to Stockhausen and the experimental avant-garde. In these same years Flavour Lab also released a couple of experimental works, *Abstract like an Absence* in 2008 and *By Hook or by Loop* in 2009.

At the end of 2006 the original band attempted yet another reunion, but the sessions lasted no more than two months before coming to nothing again. 

Cruciani, however, never lost sight of his own project and kept producing material, sometimes in collaboration with local artists or others met online.

After contributing to a few experimental tracks included on genre compilations, Flavour Sperimentale set out on a path inspired by late-1960s psychedelia, drawing on krautrock albums and early Pink Floyd. 

This gave rise to the **Pink Trilogy** (*Trilogia Rosa*), which knowingly — and rather ironically — echoes and claims kinship with the English band's sound world across three albums.

The first chapter is *A Provision of Mirages* (2008), which also draws on Indian ragas and finds points of contact with Pink Floyd's *A Saucerful of Secrets*. 

In 2009 came *Madamadama*, conceived as a study of compositions built around individual instruments: from piano to bucolic acoustic-guitar atmospheres, from sound collages to experiments with electric guitar and lap steel, all the way to studies focused on drums and percussion. 

The trilogy closed in 2010 with *Queen Moo Breakfast*, in which two long suites open and close the album, interspersed with shorter, more intimate pieces.

Once this phase was complete, Cruciani turned to live music, playing in a number of local cover bands. 

The Flavour Sperimentale project remained on hold for a few years, although — helped along by new technology that improved the quality of home recording — Cruciani kept gathering ideas and experiments.

In 2015, first under the pseudonym **Bar Psichedelico** and then returning to the Flavour Sperimentale name, the **Exalogia Colorum** was born: six albums exploring sounds suspended between electronica, psychedelia and ambient. 

Their titles are *The Slight Shade of Fading*, *Polar Solstice*, *Yellow Jackets*, *Themes from the Lumber Room*, *Opus Grey* and *Nyctophilia*.

These albums were sometimes released unfinished, under different provisional titles later revised or reworked multiple times, only reaching their definitive form years afterward — which is why databases devoted to Flavour Sperimentale, Bar Psichedelico and Flavour Lab sometimes list releases that were later withdrawn or reworked.

Continuing in the same vein, 2016 saw four releases, the so-called **Quadrilogy of Absence** (*Quadrilogia dell'Assenza*), devoted to ambient sounds. 

Here too, a number of provisional titles circulated and were later withdrawn: the definitive line-up comprises *Onirica*, *Odissea Interstellare dell'Aringa Rossa*, *Didascalia di un Gesto* and *Hydrophonia*.

As Cruciani ventured ever further into ambient music, he crossed paths with the Salerno-based artist Vincenzo Lardo, known by his stage name **240bpm**. Cruciani proposed an album built on four long soundscapes, each individually devoted to Water, Earth, Fire and Air, assembling a sound collage of nearly fifty minutes of ambient music. 

Lardo, however, turned the project on its head, steering it toward a more pop, song-based form — a shift that would draw a clear line between everything Flavour Sperimentale had produced before and everything that came after.

October 2017 thus saw the release of *In No Man's Land*, a sprawling 53-minute concept album — at a time when Flavour Sperimentale's earlier work almost never exceeded thirty minutes — still shaped by Cruciani's and Lardo's profoundly different approaches. 

While retaining some concept-album traits and a number of instrumental tracks, the record is built around a sequence of more accessible, pop-oriented songs, with sung sections playing a far more central role than in earlier compositions, where vocals had mainly served as a bridge between instrumental experiments.

The album's long gestation, though, still left Cruciani with some experimental urges to work through. 

While in 2018 Lardo directed a student collective from the Liceo Severi in Salerno in staging a musical loosely inspired by the themes and music of *In No Man's Land*, Cruciani and his Flavour Sperimentale returned to ambient and cosmic music with **Эхо Космоса** (*Echo of the Cosmos*), a project retracing the sounds of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze through long electronic soundscapes.

This, however, proved to be one last flicker of pure experimentation: in 2019 Cruciani began working on a series of compositions oriented toward rock-pop.

This new project was interrupted in early 2019 by the original band's sensational reunion: the members of Flavour got back into the studio to write new material, though once again the reunion lasted only a few months. 

The material gathered was nonetheless enough to assemble a new Flavour Sperimentale album, *Say Goodbye to Winter*, split into two sections: studio compositions on one side, and on the other two improvisations recorded live during rehearsals, which recall the band's original approach and the sprawling jam sessions of twenty years earlier.

Having returned to his own project and abandoned any ambition of bringing the band back on stage, Cruciani devoted himself to his songs. Meanwhile Armadoro, the original band's keyboardist, wrote and sent Cruciani an album of his own, made up of piano studies and sonatas. 

After an initial idea for a "double" album — with Cruciani's compositions on one side and Armadoro's more classically inclined pieces on the other — Armadoro's work was ultimately released on its own, under the title *Small Songs for a Smile*, further broadening the sonic horizon of the Flavour Sperimentale project.

In 2020, during the pandemic months, another collaboration took shape: the project **M.E.N.** was born, bringing Cruciani together with Lardo and the progressive composer and musician Maroc Grieco. 

Out of this collaboration came the concept album *Spillover*, whose long gestation would only be completed in October 2024, when it was released by the label Ma.Ra.Cash.

Having picked up and set aside his own project of songs more than once, Cruciani turned once again to Lardo/240bpm to give the new album a further pop imprint. 

And so, in September 2021, after nearly two years of work and second thoughts, *You Were All Here* was released — a thematic album alternating psychedelia and pop rock. The record was well received and was also released by netlabels abroad (France, the United States, Mexico, Germany).

2022 was marked by the death of Cruciani's father, a loss that cast doubt on whether the Flavour Sperimentale project would continue at all. But in 2023, through a series of coincidences, the members of the original line-up came back together: first Francia and Feliciotti, together with Cruciani, filmed a music video for a track from *You Were All Here*; then, despite Armadoro's absence, the band returned to the stage for three local concerts. 

The outcome, however, was the same as ever: the rifts within the band had by now become chronic, and after this brief season of concerts the group disbanded for good.

Cruciani nonetheless found the spirit to write new songs, gathering his ideas into an album ideally dedicated to his father, titled *The Infinite Horizon*, alternating intimate tracks with more instrumental moments, with contributions from both Lardo and Armadoro.

Also in 2024, Cruciani launched a new project centred on Italian pop music, in collaboration with a collective called **Nik & i Patafisici**, pushing him to further explore the pop side of his songwriting. 

The result, the album *La Giduglia*, remains unreleased to date, though a first single was already put out in July 2026.

Also in 2024, Lardo invited Cruciani as a guest at the presentation of his two new albums, *Old Shots* and *New Shots*: together they performed a set drawing on their long-standing artistic collaboration.

In 2025 Cruciani continued his compositional work and released *A Fleeting Sense of Perception*, another album of songs alternating rock and psychedelia, pop and ambient music. 

That same year, sealing an artistic partnership begun ten years earlier, Cruciani and Lardo recorded an acoustic concert together, released in January 2026 under the title *Unplugged 0808*: a performance for acoustic guitars and voices alone that strips both artists' songs back to their compositional essentials, breathing new life into the songs and lyrics.

In 2026 Cruciani embarked on a new experiment, *REC-00//REC + VOX*, based on readings of his own poems entrusted to voices of varied backgrounds: a project still ongoing, and likely destined to remain permanently open — much like the entire Flavour Sperimentale discography, cyclically revisited and reworked by Cruciani himself, in search of a definitive form that, perhaps, never truly is one.