Gian Battaglia has been involved with music and audio in some way or another from a very young age, starting out as an avid vinyl collector of obscure electronic music, spending countless hours trawling through the record shops of Leamington Spa, Coventry and Birmingham. By the age of 18 Gian had secured a DJ residency, mixing and melding vinyl every Friday night and going on to play in venues up and down the country. In becoming a DJ Gian was afforded precious time to study the structures, rhythms, timing, texture and raw emotion within electronic music, as well as how people engage and react to it, thus providing invaluable inspiration and ideologies in which he could draw upon in order to make informed creative decisions when imparting such parameters into his own productions.  

Now based in East London Gian Battaglia remains dedicated to electronic music and having spent nearly a decade seriously producing music, alongside working as a Live Sound Engineer, he made the decision in 2015 to pursue an MA in Audio Production from University of Westminster. During this time Gian explored his passion for analogue modes of music production, deep diving and developing workflows within this area, using such techniques today in order to create truly emotive, encapsulating and mood inducing ‘Music for Listening’ as he refers to it, in the sense that Battaglia’s music, although aimed at the the body, in keeping with more traditional electronic music, is also aimed at the mind.

Feeling the need to free himself from the constraints of a computer workflow during the incubation and ideas stage of his composition, 2020 saw Gian incorporate a new way of working, where each track is first fully composed on the piano. The piano parts are then recorded as MIDI before being taken into the studio where the composition is up-scaled and brought to life with the use of equipment such as Moog synths, Analogue Delays, Reel to Reel and Cassette tapes and vintage FX pedals, all running in tandem with a more modern DAW based approach once the ideas stage has been realised. Battaglia feels that this mode of production results in a brand of electronic music that is musically rich, harmonically pleasing, emotive, engaging and above all has allowed him to carve out his signature sound and stamp his distinctive production style even further throughout his music.

Gian’s music can be described as a mix of electronica with a film soundtrack ethos, drawing inspiration from ambient and neoclassical music. The music of Battaglia has enjoyed support from radio stations such as BBC 6 Music by acclaimed DJ’s such as Steve Lamacq. Gian also boasts features from acclaimed industry names and publications such as Universal Audio, Echoes and Dust, Electronic Groove, EDM Republic and Chromatic Club

Battaglia’s latest work Insert Silence consists of twelve tracks, all of which conceived on the piano and captured as MIDI, before taking the MIDI parts in to the studio to fully produce. The new album is predominantly electronic in personality and fully captures Gian’s production DNA and signature sound through his use of resplendent synth textures, yearning chord progressions, delicate harmonies and nostalgic beats, often with unapologetic exposed piano lines. This rich palette of sounds and textures are then expertly weaved together in such a way that each year Gian has spent as a professional audio engineer can be heard. The album evokes a sometimes dark yet uplifting three dimensional sound stage, along with an analogue yet ultramodern aesthetic, which along its fifty minute journey evokes feelings of: Euphoria, Lust, Frustration, Urgency, Angst, Wonder and Attitude. It is safe to say that Battaglia’s latest album encapsulates a certain musical authenticity in that it feels human, considered, faithful to his DNA and in parts brave. A project that sits comfortably in the pigeon holes of Electronica, Ambient, Film Soundtrack and Gian’s very own genre Music for Listening.