Giuseppe Ottaviani Brought a Keyboard to the Trance Stage

Giuseppe Ottaviani started piano at age four in Viterbo, a small town north of Rome, and that biographical detail explains almost everything that followed. When he found his way into trance music in the late 1990s, he brought something the genre had almost no use for at the time: hands. Real ones, trained ones, playing in real time. What he did with that training reshaped what a trance performance could be, and the scene has been running on that blueprint for two decades.

The origin story begins in 1999, when Ottaviani met fellow Italian DJs Andrea Ribeca and Giacomo Miccichè and the three formed Nu NRG. The group began releasing uplifting trance anthems almost immediately. Their first single, "Energyzer E.P.," landed on Synthetic Records in 2000. The breakthrough came a year later with "Dreamland," a driving, acid-laced anthem that landed them on Paul van Dyk's Vandit Records in 2001. Van Dyk did not just sign the track. He featured "Dreamland" on his mix album "The Politics of Dancing" for Ministry of Sound that same year, putting three Italian producers from central Italy directly into the hands of the genre's most attentive listeners. Nu NRG released a dozen singles between 2000 and 2005 and a full studio album, "Freefall," on Vandit in July 2004. The sound was high-octane but melodically focused, exactly the shape that uplifting trance was hardening into at the time.

The more consequential thing Van Dyk did was not the signing. It was the conversation that came with it. When Ottaviani came to Van Dyk's office, Van Dyk told him directly that the DJ market was already saturated, and that if he wanted to make an impact he needed to go in a distinct direction. Van Dyk had seen photographs of Ottaviani and his bandmates performing live, keyboards out, and pointed at that. The advice landed. Ottaviani built his entire solo career around the image of a producer performing on stage with a keyboard as his recognizable brand, a format he maintained from his solo debut in 2005 through to 2019. The Insomniac biography for his PureNRG project with Solarstone describes him as "the first man on the planet to imagine (and then deliver) trance as a live artist performance." That claim is broad, but the weight of it is real. Ottaviani was doing this before it was a category, and he was doing it consistently enough that it became his signature.

The solo catalog that followed the Nu NRG split in 2005 is where the argument gets specific. Tracks like "Linking People," "Through Your Eyes," and "No More Alone" — the last featuring vocalist Stephen Pickup — were released on Vandit and built a loyal following on the strength of melodic architecture that felt composed rather than assembled. Van Dyk trusted Ottaviani enough to bring him into the studio for "In Between," his fifth album, released August 14, 2007, where Ottaviani co-produced two tracks: "Far Away" and "La Dolce Vita." He returned for Van Dyk's sixth album, "Evolution," released April 3, 2012, contributing to "A Wonderful Day" among other production credits. Co-producing tracks on back-to-back albums for one of the genre's defining artists is a measure of how deeply embedded Ottaviani had become in the structural work of European trance, even as his name stayed a level below the marquee. He won Best Live Act at the Trance Awards in both 2006 and 2007, which suggests the scene knew exactly what it was watching.

The live performance question matters more than it might seem. Trance in its dominant form has always been a DJ's music, built for the booth and tested in the mix. The emotional architecture of the genre, the long build, the breakdown that strips everything back to a single melodic thread, the peak that arrives after eight minutes of earned tension, all of that translates beautifully to a DJ set. But it also means the producer behind the track is almost entirely invisible. Ottaviani's insistence on performing his music with a keyboard in hand was a structural argument about what trance actually was. He was saying: this music has harmonic content worth playing, not just triggering. His classical training meant he could hear the difference between a melody that sits on top of a production and one that runs through it. That difference is audible across his work, and it is part of why his productions for Van Dyk feel compositionally heavier than a lot of what surrounded them.

The 2019 album "Evolver," released on Black Hole Recordings, brought the argument into the present tense. Tracks like "Tranceland," "8K," and "Panama" demonstrated that the melodic logic Ottaviani had been developing since "Dreamland" in 2001 had not softened into nostalgia. The PureNRG project with Solarstone, which began in 2015, extended the live performance concept further. The two producers use a custom-designed setup built from the actual instruments used to make their studio tracks, so that the music coming off the stage is literally coming from inside the source. That is a philosophical position as much as a technical one, and it traces directly back to a piano student from Viterbo who showed up to a Vandit Records office with photographs of himself playing live. The genre handed him a keyboard and told him to go somewhere different. He went further than anyone expected.