Giuseppe Ottaviani

Giuseppe Ottaviani is an Italian DJ and producer born 12 November 1978 in Viterbo, a small town north of Rome. He began studying piano at the age of four and was trained in classical music as a teenager before discovering electronic music and starting to play DJ sets at local clubs and on radio in the mid-1990s. That classical-into-electronic trajectory is audible in the keyboard-led structure of nearly everything he has released since. In 1999 he joined Andrea Ribeca and Giacomo Miccichè to form NU NRG, the trio that began releasing on Paul van Dyk's Vandit Records in 2001 and won the Trance Award for Best Live Act in 2004, 2006 and 2007. Ottaviani started his solo career in parallel from 2005, eventually focusing on it full time. His debut solo album GO! arrived on Vandit in 2009, followed by Magenta (2013) and Evolver (2019). In February 2011 he launched his GO On Air radio show, which has since grown into a full label and weekly programme on DI.FM and other syndicators. Alongside the solo discography he holds the long-running Pure NRG duo with Solarstone, focused on classic uplifting reinterpretations. Ottaviani's signature contribution is the live-performance approach. Rather than DJing pre-prepared sets, his GO Live format is performed on a custom hardware rig of synthesisers, drum machines, sequencers and live effects, with him triggering, layering and arranging the music in real time. The setup blurs the line between DJ and live artist and has earned him bookings at Tomorrowland, Luminosity, A State of Trance festival editions, Dreamstate, and Transmission. Within the uplifting wing of trance he is one of the few names who has stayed both technically curious and commercially current across the late-2000s peak, the mid-2010s mainstage years, and the current revival.