Sergio Messina

Sergio Messina (b. 1959) is an Italian electronic/experimental musician, radio activist, and multimedia artist. He started broadcasting at various radio stations in 1975, at the very beginning of the pirate radio movement in Italy. Messina also worked as a professional DJ (1982–88) and was briefly involved in the first hip-hop movement in Rome. In 1989, Sergio Messina started performing his live electronic show RadioMantra with a computer and samplers. As a part of this project, he recorded RadioGladio, a "no copyright" song/message aimed at the American audience. It was distributed for free on cassettes, encouraging people to duplicate it at home. RadioGladio gained some international success, with various radio stations around the world broadcasting it and Frank Zappa praising the composition in one of his interviews. Eventually, Sergio Messina took Radio Gladio as his music alias. Several compilations featured the track, forcing the artist to put a copyright on it. Messina continued making radio art (mainly in Austria, in collaboration with Kunstradio) and composing music under the name RadioGladio in Italy throughout the 1990s. Since 1992, he also had been working as a musician, producer and remixer with various Italian bands, including hip-hop group 99 Posse. In 2000, the artist participated in the Ars Electronica Festival as a musician (this collaborative performance with Alexander Balanescu and other artists had been released on Lume Lume album) and a featured lecturer at the symposium, where he presented his talk-installation Realcore on the digital porn revolution. He was invited by the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Milan to organize a three-year Sound Design School in 2005. Sergio Messina also worked as a visiting artist and full faculty member at The School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago (SAIC) in 2009. Currently, Sergio is teaching sound design and history of pop culture at IED. Messina published his first book Real Sex, Alt Porn is the new Rock'n'roll in 2010, and formed the Soslo duo with his longtime friend and collaborator Painè Cuadrelli in 2011.