🌆 Citysink is a surreal Berlin cyber-noir trip in which a brilliant inventor leaves his retro-tech high-rise workspace on an azure bicycle, witnesses an impossible reality glitch at a currywurst kiosk, and is pulled into a paranoid underworld of surveillance, bureaucracy, wild animals, analog machines, and metaphysical decay.

This song is the echo of that story: a soundscape born from a nomad’s bonfire, a missing cloth, a restless herd, and the quiet resistance of people who still live by rhythms older than modern convenience. Before or after you listen, read the story that inspired it.

In the very last stretch before the pandemic, I began playing organ with SAKILI, a Berlin-based roots-reggae and chanson project led by Antoine Villoutreix. We rehearsed in Pepe Rasmus Weissgerber’s practice room around Ostkreuz: a warm, lived-in Proberaum with that very particular Berlin mixture of music, craft, odd equipment, wood dust, friendship, and unfinished plans.

I never played a gig with SAKILI. My whole chapter with the band happened in that rehearsal room, where I tried to learn and play their complete setlist on organ. It was beautiful, but it was also daunting. Reggae is not as simple as it may sound from the outside, and at that time I was going through a very stressful period in Berlin. Eventually I left the band, and not long after that I left Berlin for good.

In 2006, during a short gap between travels and projects — and shortly before I left for Australia for what would become several years abroad — I had the chance to collaborate as a guest keyboardist with Fire Makers, an independent heavy metal band from Italy.

The contact came through Massimo “Dingo” Candido, who involved me in the recording sessions for material connected to the band’s Metal Empire project. I recorded my keyboard parts at ACME Studios in Abruzzo, near the Sulmona / Raiano area: a compact but serious recording environment that, at the time, gave the session the right balance between underground metal energy and professional studio focus.