Francesca Marongiu is an electronic music composer and sound designer from Rome, now based in Tuscany. Through voice, synthesis and ethnomusicology, she explored music with a fascination for how harmony and texture shape listening, gradually developing a personal approach that blends acoustic sensitivity with electronic processes.
Her work moves between sound, memory and place, weaving ambient forms into layered, atmospheric compositions. Over the years, she has released music on labels such as Utech Records, Stunned, Midira and Zeitgeists Publishing.
Her debut album under her own name, Still Forms in Air, has been released on Umor Rex on August 14, 2025.
3 FACTS
1: If you have a creative idea about something, Calvino probably already thought of it.
2: In German and English, natura morta has a much better and more fitting name: Still Leben and Still Life — “silent life.” It’s a painting that depicts the silent life of objects, a calm existence expressed through volume, form and plasticity. (Giorgio De Chirico)
3: Fascists use poverty to perpetuate poverty, and man against man. (Italo Calvino)
11 QUESTIONS
1. What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
Other music, architecture, natural landscapes, exploring new ways of processing sound and walking through places I love both architecturally and acoustically.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
I grew up surrounded by music thanks to my father, a passionate listener. I remember long car trips where we’d sit in silence so he could fully take in 70s albums filled with intricate arrangements and counterpoint. In middle school, my mother started taking piano and guitar lessons, and seeing her play made me want to start too — first guitar, then piano. I eventually quit lessons but kept listening obsessively.
During my first year at university, I discovered two albums that changed my life: Musik to Play in the Dark by Coil and Shamansong by Joan La Barbara. Listening to them made me realise that making music gave me as much pleasure as listening to it. So I installed my first version of Pro Tools, enrolled in a music school, and went deeper into the study of electronic music and ethnomusicology at university.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time?
Here are the first five that pop into my head, totally at random:
Jon Hassell, Brian Eno – Fourth World, Vol.1: Possible Musics
Slowdive – Pygmalion
Visible Cloaks – Reassemblage
Xenakis – GRM Works 1957-1962
Talk Talk – Laughing Stock
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
It’s one of my favourite cities. I associate it with music, and I think it’s still a special place for artists and creatives, despite the increasing challenges of living in large, expensive cities where niche musicians struggle to balance art and other work.
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
In Rome, I love the EUR district, even if it’s tied to a dark chapter in our history. In Pistoia, I love Villone Puccini, a 19th-century park with an Italian-style garden. Nearby there’s a modernist church by Giovanni Michelucci — my obsession with the meeting of these two styles keeps resurfacing.
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
I’d be an architect.
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
The vinyl reissue of Plight and Premonition by Czukay/Sylvian, a record I love.
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Jim O’ Rourke or Jessika Kenney (or both, together!).
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As a spectator, probably Eyvind Kang’s Chirality / Virginal Coordinates in 2015 at the Angelica festival, with a large orchestra and Alan Bishop from Sun City Girls on vocals.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
Essential. Whether through modular synths, FM synthesis, digital processes or more traditional analog gear, technology shapes every stage of my work. I see the studio itself as an instrument, a space where tools and ideas interact, blurring the lines between composition, performance and sound design.
11. Please tell us a bit more about your new album Still Forms in Air?
It brings together ideas I’ve been exploring over the last few years, inspired by so-called “MIDI naturalism” and a renewed interest in 1980s Japanese ambient music, a gateway for me into FM synthesis, which I’ve then pushed into more contemporary digital processes.
It’s also a very personal album. After a long silence (my last release was in 2016, and it was part of a group project, very far from the music I’m making now), I felt the need to bring together influences I’d collected over time. Moving to Tuscany years ago was key, it’s a region dotted with land art among rolling hills, medieval towns and also modernist and brutalist architecture, utopian visions of a better society. Coming from Rome, I still find the political sense of those ideals stronger here.
The places I’ve lived in and travelled through over the past decade shaped the record, a sense of crystallisation despite tourism and constant change. My approach to sound wasn’t nostalgic; I chose more contemporary tones and open dynamics to underline the tension between the evolution that could have happened (for better or worse) and the reality that it hasn’t. Many towns here are architecturally almost unchanged from 30–40 years ago, so looking out the window you could easily think you were in 1985. In some cases, there’s an atmosphere reminiscent of De Chirico’s paintings during certain times of the year (here in Pistoia, but also in Livorno, for example). Elsewhere, there’s a feeling of extreme decay — yet with a unique beauty — like one of Calvino’s invisible cities in a world nearing its end (I’m thinking of Carrara, probably the strangest place I’ve visited recently). In some way, I tried to capture all of this in the album, spatialising it as I imagined it while moving through it.
