After Lorenzo Raganzini became known for techno metal, he booked a live show at a 2,000-capacity venue in Berlin, where he advertised he would play guitar to fuel his high-energy productions on stage.

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He had never played a guitar before in his life.

On his tracks, he used plugins like Archetype’s Gojira X, recorded professional guitarists. But he took on the challenge anyway and gave himself one year to learn well enough to perform live.

“Now I need to learn. Tickets were going really fast. This is real. There are gonna be 2,000 people expecting me to play well,” Raganzini explains. “The stress of learning to play guitar in just one year cost me a lot of acupuncture in my back.”

His next live set didn’t require physical intervention, but it was still quite the undertaking. He performed a live electronic set, combining classic pieces of hardware with newer innovations.

The primary piece was the Midas Venice 240, the same tried-and-true mixing desk that techno legend Paul Kalkbrenner uses during his shows. On the more modern side, he linked a Motu UltraLite-mk5 and Arturia AudioFuse X8 OUT extender. The Motu UltraLite has eight mono outputs, and the AudioFuse adds eight more.

However, where many artists would send the wide array of outputs into a series of experimental apparatuses to maximize the tactile manipulation of live set, 16 outputs is the bare minimum for Raganzini to properly deliver his original music.

To run the core elements of his tracks, such as kick, bass, and synth, with his Erica Synths Zen Delay and the Strymon BigSky Multidimensional Reverb, the sounds have to be output in stereo. All of the inputs and outputs on the Ultralite are mono, which could work for live sets made up of different, more minimal elements, but that is not the case with Raganzini’s brand of techno.

“All my sounds are pretty fat and wide. Even the bass has one part in mono, but also one top part in stereo, which makes it really big. The kick isn’t a 909. It’s a kick with some rumble in it, and some space,” he says. “Everything needs to go out in stereo. If I want to separate more, I will need a really big and also very expensive sound card.”

Until that time, he is content with working with eight primary channels, both live and in the studio. “My dream is to always work with eight tracks,” he says. Even when he’s combining techno and metal. In the thick of these two distinct walls of sound, the ostensibly easier path would be to load the sessions with different tracks: duplicates of drums, layers of effects, numerous distorted synths stacked on top of each other.

The song We Are Rebels, from his debut album, Techno Rebels, packs the walls with aggressive guitars, intense screams, galloping synths, and titanic drums. And yet somehow, Raganzini’s approach is actually quite minimalistic, whether he’s making techno metal or one of the various other techno styles he explores on the LP:

“For me, a song is made of three channels: Kick, bass, and synth. There, you have the idea; that is where I like to focus,” Raganzini says. “When I’m in testing mode, and I just want to have fun, sometimes I add a lot of channels, one on top of the other. I feel like it’s going to be super energetic, but after a few hours, I remove everything, and I feel that without all the percussion, it was more energetic. The bass was more present, the kick more present.”

While it might seem like purposefully creating with less would make things easier, the dichotomy between the process and his goal for the music can cause tension. Raganzini’s goal is complex. The music is loud, yes, but it’s about properly communicating musical ideas from three core elements, as he does on stage.

“For me, a song is made of three channels: Kick, bass, and synth. There, you have the idea; that is where I like to focus”

“You need to be very sure about those three elements. It’s [easier] to stop thinking about them and add more stuff on top,” Raganzini says. “I need to remind myself, keep it simple, because at the end, if the idea is there, you don’t need to add so much stuff. It’s counterintuitive and hard.”

As hard as it may be, he keeps going, as he did with his live sets. He’s not naive. He knows a significant portion of the crowd probably can’t tell a bit of difference between when he’s performing live or DJing. And after DJing for 13 years, he is confident in his ability to create a unique, intentional experience for his audience.

“I don’t know if it’s really worth it to do all this, to put all this effort into creating something different, if at the end it’s just a matter of making people dance. But I wanted to do it, I wanted to believe in this approach — in the possibility of doing something different and challenging,” Raganzini admits.

“In a DJ set, very few things can go wrong. Maybe one CDJ dies —you still have three of them. But if something happens live, you probably have to stop the whole performance. This put me in a vulnerable position, where I wanted to place myself. When you’re vulnerable, you are more sensitive, and you connect more with people.”

His vulnerability fuels all of the challenges. He could get away with overloading his sessions to make loud music, but instead, he communicates honest ideas. They’re loud and intense because that’s what’s going on inside his mind and heart, and that’s how he approached Techno Rebels.

Raganzini wrote an entire story to coincide with the record. He doesn’t want to share specifics because it’s too personal, but for each song, there is a specific scene that he dictated and meditated on before making the music.

“All these influences that I put in the album — 90s music, like The Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, nu metal, everything that I listen to in my head — made me what I am today. Being a rebel is to publish that music without comparison,” Raganzini says. “I’m not sure if people will like it or not, but it is what it is. I don’t know where to put it or where it could be played. I wanted to take the courage and tell my life story with 11 songs.”

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