When Matteo Capreoli moved from Hamburg (where he lived for 6 years) to Berlin about three years ago, he was a picture-perfect pop artist. His catalogue encompasses three critically acclaimed German-speaking singer-songwriter albums exploring different genres like reggae, hip-hop and freak folk within his catchy tunes. Next to his own productions the Italian born, and Stuttgart raised musician also produced or co-worked with other successful German acts like Samy Deluxe, Yvonne Catterfield, Y’akoto and Bengio.
Living in Berlin, Matteo soon caught the electronic bug and when working on a composition for a short documentary, he had a career-changing epiphany. From now on his music should sound much grander and more spectacular, his passion for cinematographic sounds was about to flourish. The moniker TTeo was born. With his new alias Matteo Capreoli could finally play out his innermost love for longer arrangements and instrumental pieces. Still a pop artist at heart, this newfound freedom allowed Matteo deliberately to develop his creative process into fresh experimental directions and dimensions.
TTeo assumed shape musically while Matteo spent endless hours alone in his Berlin studio and his retreat in Southern Italy where his family hails from. Here he wrote the first few tracks that would become the foundation of «Salento», TTeo’s first release to come out on Sonar Kollektiv in the second half of 2020. All the compositions to be found on «Salento» are reduced to the max radiating pure excitement and powerful energy. By combining spheric and electronic sounds with classical, physical instruments (Matteo has a vast collection of wooden instruments and synths) the result could be described as a film score you can dance to.
It’s quite obvious that Matteo Capreoli’s new habitat made him reinvent himself and his musical output completely. You literally can hear how Berlin and its citizens, its clubs, the living between the hood («Kiez») and the metropolitan lifestyle rattled and changed Capreoli fundamentally and made him become TTeo. All and everything were scaled and boiled down to its essence, his life, his environment, his music.
Where the journey will take Matteo Capreoli after this album is uncertain. It’s possible that the next long player will be a pure piano album. What is sure: Matteo Capreoli will always follow the rules of his intuition and he will look for new challenges wherever he can find them to free himself from his own stories and tell them to the world outside listening.
