I am Luca Cipressi, also known as Milletgrain: a musician, visual storyteller, and technologist interested in the places where sound, images, electronics, and memory meet.

Music and engineering have always developed side by side in my life. I began with instruments, recording equipment, and analog electronics, later moving into software, digital audio, embedded systems, photography, video editing, and interactive media. Rather than treating these as separate disciplines, I use them as parts of the same creative language.

This blog is both a portfolio and a personal archive. It gathers music releases, live performances, video projects, technical experiments, restorations, unfinished ideas, and stories connected with the people and places that shaped them.

🎹 Music, Images, and Places

My musical world includes piano, Hammond organ, keyboards, fretless bass, theremin, didgeridoo, and electronic instruments. I have played in bands, rehearsal rooms, studios, theatres, and unconventional performance spaces, moving between progressive rock, reggae, ambient music, experimental composition, and soundtrack work.

Many projects began through encounters rather than formal plans: musicians met in Berlin and Stuttgart, theatre and dance collaborations in Abruzzo, photographic performances in Chieti, and journeys through Australia, North Africa, and other landscapes that later resurfaced in music and images.

Works such as Goats, Tea and Trouble, Citysink, Caro Diario, and La Magia e la Storia dei Luoghi siamo Noi combine original music with photography, performance, dance, narration, or cinematic imagery. Some are documentaries of real events; others transform memories into fictional or dreamlike visual worlds.

I am especially interested in stories that retain their imperfections. Old rehearsal recordings, unfinished albums, restored equipment, forgotten venues, and difficult periods can all reveal something that a polished biography would otherwise leave out.

🎧 Recording, Mixing, and Visual Production

I compose and record original music, soundtracks, and audiovisual pieces for personal projects, live performances, documentaries, and short or medium-length films.

My approach to recording and mastering favours clarity, dynamics, and musical intention over unnecessary loudness. I enjoy both the warmth and unpredictability of analog equipment and the precision of modern digital production, choosing the tools according to the character of each work.

Video editing, photography, colour, typography, and cinematic pacing are also central to the process. More recently, I have explored AI-assisted image generation as another creative instrument—not as a replacement for authorship, but as a way to build scenes that would otherwise remain sketches, memories, or impossible locations.

Where appropriate, releases are prepared for modern high-resolution and spatial-audio distribution formats.

🧑🏻‍💻 Electronics, Software, and Instrument Design

Under the Lucaji name, I publish technical work related to electronics, software, audio, and musical instruments.

My professional experience has often occupied the space between hardware and software engineering. Over more than three decades, I have worked with analog circuits, embedded systems, measurement equipment, firmware, digital signal processing, desktop and mobile software, and the practical problems that appear when all these layers must operate together.

The projects documented here include tube-amplifier builds, vintage audio restorations, active instrument electronics, measurement systems, custom displays, experimental controllers, and several generations of theremin research. I am particularly drawn to instruments whose behaviour emerges from the interaction between physical circuitry and software rather than from either domain alone.

🔗 Visit the Links page for my social presence hooks

Links

📸 Photo Gallery