Massimo Gabutti, Bliss Corporation's General Manager started making (and then producing) music in the 80s and hasn't stopped since!
In an interview with Decadance book's co-author Giosuè Impellizzeri he has described the beginning of his path and how it evolved in the years.
It all started with a C120 cassette on which a couple of my uncles had copied a two albums, there were Black Sabbath on one side and Led Zeppelin on the other. [...] In middle school somebody told me about a guy who, according to all the music teachers, was the new Mozart [...] Claudio Fiorentino [...] He taught me how to play the guitar when I was thirteen [...] then we started a couple of music bands, we made the charts [...] and we ended up working on “La Danza Delle Streghe”. [...] It was with Claudio Fiorentino and other three friends [...] that I started a new wave band [...] One day we discovered that a music shop in Turin [...] had organized, through a radio, a competition for the production of a single [...] In order to enter the competition we were supposed to bring a dance demo [...] we got to our basement and in a couple of hours we had a rough version of what would be “Talk About”.
Just like that, a group of young musicians called "Phaeax", approaches success for the first time:
A couple of weeks from the release a representative from CGD [...] offered to introduce us to the new junior A&R of the label, Tino Silvestri [...] Tino literally fell in love with the track and played it to Claudio Cecchetto who used to work at CDG publishing two tracks-mixes called “AB”. We ended up on one of those, together with “Vamos A La Playa” by Righeira and that was a double success! [...] We got this close to the official top 10.
But reaching your first success doesn't necessarily mean having understood how to deal with it!
We had found our success with an italo disco track that we had completed in two hours and we felt like geniuses. To be honest we hadn’t really grasped the fundamentals of italo disco. We hated using that four-on-the-floor beat because we found it… too italo disco. [...] I paid my dues: it took me six years to make it back to the charts (“Tell Me Why (Te Ne Vai!)” by Lorimeri), seven years to collaborate on a true success (“Gente Della Notte” by Jovanotti) and ten years to be back at number one with a song entirely produced by me (“People Have The Power” by Bliss Team).
From making music to becoming a producer. The birth of Bliss Corporation:
Leaving behind the productions and synergies he had carried out in Milan, Gabutti established his own music label in 1992 together with his friend Luciano Zucchet. [...] The results aren’t long in coming, with Bliss Team and Da Blitz. [...] The beginnings of Bliss Corporation were very simple. I met Roberto Molinaro thanks to a music shop [...] He brought a man with himself, Maurizio Lobina [...] who shined in the creation of arpeggios. [...] After a while Gianfranco “Jeffrey” Randone arrived. [...] One day another boy showed up, he had long hair and the eyes of a Siberian Husky. He wasn’t a musician, he was a DJ [...] I’m talking about Gabry Ponte.
And we all know what these synergies were about to create:
In the autumn of 1998, after an impasse, Bliss Corporation released a track that would leave a deep mark in pop/dance music, “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” by Eiffel 65, even though the first perspectives were other than rosy and encouraging.
But the music scene evolves very rapidly, and it has deeply changed since the 90s.
To wrap up the interview, Giosuè investigates in Massimo's thoughts about the future of music in Italy:
Speaking about the future [...] it is undeniable that certain styles and historical moments leave a stronger mark than others. Italian rap and trap, for example, have now reached the highest peak of popularity and artistic quality which could resonate over the next years [...] It’s also thanks to this ongoing experimentation that electronic music and rap/trap might meet in the future.