Curious Music proudly presents Box of Ghosts, a box set that brings together Luca Formentini’s I Am Ghosts series in its entirety.
Featuring all four EPs—I Am Ghosts 1-4—this collection offers a fully immersive experience that captures Luca’s exploration of unseen forces and introspective soundscapes.
With Box of Ghosts, Luca’s I Am Ghosts project finds a cohesive and expansive form, uniting the memories, energies, and “ghosts” that inspire the music into a singular yet dynamic voice. This collection is more than a retrospective—it’s a stepping stone, a space where the past meets the future, offering a resonant glimpse into the multiplicity within us all.
Enriching the set are two brand-new tracks, accompanied by binaural mixes created by Luca’s label mate, Peter Chilvers. These new compositions resonate with possibilities, their tones and textures pointing toward Luca’s next chapter. They bridge the themes of I Am Ghosts with a forward-looking energy, inviting listeners to glimpse the emerging shape of what lies ahead.
About Luca Formentini:
Luca Formentini was born in 1968 in Brescia, northern Italy. He's a music composer, sound artist, environmental activist and wine maker.
He recognizes his first intimate connection with sound when listening to the drones created by home electric appliances. Fascinated by acoustic phenomena after recognizing the multiple layers of sounds (the harmonics of a piano) when he was 10, four years later he began to compose music through a free approach to the guitar on which he is self-taught.
Along his life he was exposed to different musical approaches by meeting some of their prominent names such as the creativity and flow of free improvisation with Derek Bailey, Jon Russell and Henry Kaiser, the poetry behind creating your own instrument with Hans Reichel, the width and wilderness of guitar with Elliott Sharp, the candid joy of using electronics to visit oblique territories with Holger Czukay up to a deep use of processing, the one to flow into the magic, with Jon Hassell and Robert Rich.
Some of these amazing musicians have been or still are his mentors in music and life.
Such experiences have enforced his attitude to consider sound as a tool to explore, investigate and engage human depth by calling it back to its nature. They formed his vocabulary and combine in his style, which sometimes make Formentini a musician difficult to classify into a specific music genre.
Evocative ambient moments acquire tension, angular passages become mysterious and poetic, chilling atmospheres blend with eerieness; timbres can morph from ethereal, esoteric and almost impalpable to dry, haunting and material. This can also happen simultaneously: contrasting sounds taking place on different layers fuse themself to open the emotional width.
The same is to be found in the structure of his songs, sometimes organized in recognizable sections, often making a unique flow or developing through passages as entering different scenes of the same story. This results in keeping both himself and the listener engaged and connected.
He has a passion for human cultures, western philosophy and psychology, I-Ching, shamanism and Taoism. He loves languages and semantics, he speaks English and German and understands French. He's interested in different forms of artistic expression, abstract art in particular. We often find him collaborating with sculptors and painters, movie directors and dance companies.
Art Spaces is an investigation on the subject of contemporary art and the acoustic environment.
Beside guitar he uses self made instruments, voice, field recordings and other acoustic, analogue and electronic instruments. He intensively works on processing sounds in real time using hardware outboard and software, this procedure is often making an essential part of his instrument.
He played and recorded with Markus Stockhausen, Robert Rich, Holger Czukay, Lino Capra Vaccina, Steve Lawson, Frank Vigroux, Steve Jansen, Theo Travis, Alvin Curran, Paolo Dellapiana, Stefano Castagna, Deborah Walker.
He has published five solo albums and has taken part to several releases of collaborations and side projects, he toured in Europe, USA and Japan.
