BIO

ORIGINS

PSYCHEDELIA AND JAM SESSIONS

The project took its first steps in October 1997, when four friends driven by the same musical passion began meeting up to play. The early sessions were guided by exploration: free, fluid improvisations steeped in psychedelic nuances that immediately became the group's stylistic signature.

The original lineup—baptized simply as Flavour—featured Francesco Francia on drums, Paolo Feliciotti on bass, Giovanni Armadoro on keyboards, and Nicola Cruciani on guitar.

Right from the start, the band paired early club gigs with intense songwriting activity. What truly set Flavour apart in this initial phase was a radical, experimental approach to improvisation: original tracks and covers were constantly dismantled and expanded into extremely long instrumental suites, where the creative flow developed in real time.

The most faithful testimony of this season is the album/bootleg I Maius MCMXCVIII, a sonic cross-section collecting live recordings, rehearsal room sessions, and a studio track closing out the work. Initially printed on an audio cassette with the palindromic title "Was it a cat I saW?", the tape was later digitized in 2001 and distributed in an extremely limited run among friends and early supporters.

After a series of local concerts, Flavour's journey reached a natural conclusion around 2000, bringing down the curtain on the first chapter of their history.

THE LABORATORY

THE EXPERIMENTAL ERA (2002–2006)

Between 2002 and 2004, several attempts were made to reassemble the original lineup, but it was Cruciani who took over the project's torch, transforming its identity into Flavour Sperimentale.

This new incarnation was born as an open, collaborative laboratory, frequently projected onto early web platforms and shared with online artists. It was a period of fertile, underground exploration: dozens of drafts and research tracks were born, many destined to remain unreleased or to be published under monikers and pseudonyms like Flavour Lab.

The first official building block of this course was ZU, a work focused on studies and loops of prepared piano. Distributed via MySpace, the album received a timid response, but an unexpected short-circuit occurred on the same platform: the original band's debut album captured the favor of a new niche of listeners, surpassing the 80,000-stream threshold.

Concurrently, under the Flavour Lab moniker, Cruciani teamed up with various collaborators for a series of unofficial releases that briefly appeared online before being removed, fueling an almost cult-like aura around the band's material.

In 2006 came the second chapter signed by Flavour Sperimentale: Elektronische Musik. While ZU looked toward manipulated acoustics, this new work steered decisively toward pure electronics, directly recalling the lessons of Karlheinz Stockhausen and twentieth-century elite avant-gardes.

In late 2006, the historical lineup attempted to reconnect through a series of jam sessions, but the experience fizzled out within a couple of months. Nonetheless, the project's engine did not stop: Cruciani continued writing, recording, and forging synergies with local musicians and remote contacts, releasing projects with Flavour Lab.

PINK TRILOGY

A TRIBUTE TO PINK FLOYD (2008–2010)

After contributing tracks to avant-garde music compilations, Flavour Sperimentale charted a new course. The project returned to its psychedelic roots, drawing heavily on late-60s Krautrock sounds and the cosmic explorations of early Pink Floyd.

From this fascination took shape the Pink Trilogy: a discographic triptych that, with lucid awareness and a subtle vein of irony, reclaimed and paid homage to the British group's sonic imagery.

The first chapter, A Provision of Mirages (2008), fused raga suggestions with lysergic architectures, evoking the sprawling atmospheres of A Saucerful of Secrets.

It was followed in 2009 by Madamadama, a conceptual work structured as an analytical investigation into the expressive possibilities of individual instruments: shifting from piano scores to bucolic acoustic watercolors, from lap steel and electric guitar experiments to sound collages and rhythmic studies for drums and percussion.

The cycle closed in 2010 with Queen Moo Breakfast, an album framed by two long instrumental suites interspersed with shorter, more intimate, and contemplative musical textures.

With the trilogy concluded, Cruciani temporarily suspended the Flavour Sperimentale brand to dedicate himself to live performance with various local scene cover bands. Even so, research did not stop: aided by the home-recording technology revolution, Cruciani continued privately cataloging ideas, refining production, and accumulating material for chapters to come.

EXALOGIA COLORUM AND THE ABSENCE

BETWEEN ELECTRONICA, AMBIENT, AND FLUID DISCOGRAPHIES

The year 2015 marked a new phase of creative ferment. Under the pseudonym Bar Psichedelico—a name used alongside Flavour Lab for a series of experimental B-projects—Cruciani brought Exalogia Colorum to life: an ambitious sonic painting articulated across six albums, suspended on the border between ambient, electronica, and psychedelia. Although also published under the name Flavour Sperimentale, the Exalogia ultimately remained exclusively a Bar Psichedelico release.

The six chapters composing the work initially experienced an open and fluid genesis. Some works were made available in provisional versions, with alternative titles later withdrawn or subjected to a lengthy revision process, finding a definitive setup only years later. This discographic dynamism explains the inconsistencies or "ghost" titles present in many archives and databases dedicated to Flavour Sperimentale, Bar Psichedelico, and Flavour Lab.

Without interrupting his production flow, 2016 saw the birth of the Quadrilogia dell'Assenza, a cycle of four albums entirely focused on the exploration of ambient and minimalist landscapes. Similarly to the Exalogia, this project also went through a settling phase before crystallizing into its official sequence, published under the Bar Psichedelico name, despite some versions carrying the Flavour Sperimentale moniker.

THE POP PIVOT

THE CONCEPT ALBUM IN NO MAN'S LAND (2017–2019)

As Cruciani's path pushed deeper into ambient territory with his Bar Psichedelico works, he crossed paths with Salerno-born artist Vincenzo Lardo (aka 240bpm). Cruciani's initial idea was to create a monumental ambient suite of nearly fifty minutes, divided into four broad soundscapes dedicated to the primordial elements: Water, Earth, Fire, and Air.

Lardo, however, sensed a different direction and reinterpreted the raw material, steering production toward more pop, airy, and melodic structures. This intuition marked a point of no return, establishing a sharp turning point in Flavour Sperimentale's discography.

Thus, in October 2017, In No Man's Land saw the light of day—an imposing 53-minute concept album representing a decidedly larger format than previous works, which rarely exceeded half an hour. The record thrived on the fertile tension between two worlds: while preserving the narrative nature of a concept album with rich instrumental inserts, the work developed around immediate, pop-oriented tracks. For the first time, vocal lines abandoned their role as simple transitions between instrumental textures to become the driving engine of the sonic architecture.

The album's impact went beyond discographic boundaries: in 2018, Lardo directed a student collective from the Severi High School in Salerno for the staging of a musical show loosely adapted from the record's themes and scores.

Meanwhile, the album's complex gestation prompted Cruciani to reopen a parenthesis of pure cosmic research. Thus was born under the Flavour Sperimentale brand Эхо Космоса (Echo of the Cosmos), a tribute to the atmospheres of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, built on hypnotic, extensive synthetic soundscapes.

This work represented the final glow of Flavour Sperimentale's purely avant-garde phase: as early as 2019, Cruciani began laying the groundwork for a new compositional season, ready to combine past complexity with rock-pop energy.

REUNION AND POP-ROCK HORIZONS

BETWEEN COLLABORATIONS, ENCOUNTERS, AND THE FINAL FAREWELL (2019–2023)

At the beginning of 2019, the new pop-rock course was temporarily frozen by the return to the studio of the historical Flavour lineup. Although the band's reunion lasted only a few months, the short-lived renewed synergy was enough to produce material for a new chapter: Say Goodbye to Winter. The work possessed a dual soul: studio-structured tracks on one hand, and two visceral improvisations recorded during rehearsals that directly reconnected with the oceanic jam sessions of twenty years prior.

With the band chapter closed and the idea of bringing the historical lineup back live put aside, Cruciani returned to focusing on his solo compositions. This phase incorporated Armadoro's contribution: the original band's keyboardist sent Cruciani a corpus of piano studies and sonatas. Initially conceived as a double album contrasting Cruciani's songs with Armadoro's classical roots, the piano material ultimately found its own autonomous dignity on the record Small Songs for a Smile, further expanding the expressive catalog of the Flavour Sperimentale brand.

In 2020, during the lockdown period, a new and ambitious synergy was born under the acronym M.E.N., featuring Cruciani alongside Vincenzo Lardo and progressive musician/composer Marco Grieco. The trio worked on the concept album Spillover, a complex work with a long gestation that finally saw the light in October 2024 via the prestigious Ma.Ra.Cash Records label.

Meanwhile, eager to infuse fresh life and a decidedly pop footprint into his solo tracks, Cruciani renewed his collaboration with Lardo/240bpm. After two years of refinement and rethinking, September 2021 saw the release of You Were All Here, a thematic album skillfully balanced between pop rock and psychedelic undertones. Reception was excellent, crossing national borders with distribution by netlabels in France, the United States, Mexico, and Germany.

The year 2022 brought a heavy personal loss: the passing of Cruciani's father tested the very continuity of the project. However, in 2023, a series of coincidences reignited the engines. Francia, Feliciotti, and Cruciani reunited to shoot the music video for a single from You Were All Here; the rediscovered chemistry prompted the three—despite Armadoro's absence—to return to the stage for three local concerts. But the balance was precarious: chronic internal differences led to the irretrievable and definitive breakup of the original band at the end of the dates. The reunion was nonetheless documented by the live collection Backflow, released in November 2023.

Drawing strength from grief and the closure of this long circle, Cruciani gathered his compositional ideas into a work intimately dedicated to his father's memory: The Infinite Horizon. Between moments of intense reflection and instrumental openings, the album charted a course toward the future.

ACOUSTIC ELEMENTS AND OPEN WORKS

TOWARD COMPOSITIONAL ESSENCE AND THE UNFINISHED FUTURE (2024–2026)

In 2024, Nicola Cruciani opened a new exploratory front, inaugurating a project dedicated to canzone d'autore (singer-songwriter tradition) and Italian pop music in collaboration with the collective Nik & i Patafisici. This encounter pushed him to further deepen the more immediate, lyrical component of his songwriting. The fruit of this synergy was the creation of the album La Giduglia, anticipated in July 2026 by the release of its first official single.

Also in 2024, the partnership with Lardo was renewed: invited as guest of honor at the presentation of the latter's two new solo works (Old Shots and New Shots), Cruciani shared the stage with him for a live set retracing the highlights of their multi-year shared journey.

The creative push continued in 2025 with the release of A Fleeting Sense of Perception, a work perfectly synthesizing all the project's souls: a fluid alternation of rock hints, psychedelic undertones, pop openings, and ambient rarefactions.

To seal a decade of artistic complicity, between late 2025 and early 2026 Unplugged 0808 was pressed (recorded live the previous August). Recorded using only acoustic guitars and vocals, the album stripped Cruciani and Lardo's tracks of all production bells and whistles, returning them to their original essence and lending new intensity and transparency to the lyrics.

Throughout 2026, new conceptual challenges took space. A deliberately open construction site lacking a definitive endpoint—a faithful mirror of the entire parabola of Flavour Sperimentale and the equally active Bar Psichedelico. A corpus of works in continuous metamorphosis, cyclically revisited, expanded, and reworked, where the pursuit of the perfect form is not a destination, but a perpetually moving horizon.