Mauro Picotto

Mauro Picotto was born on 25 December 1966 in Cavour, near Turin in northern Italy, into a family of stonemasons and dancers — his father's CRW mason's yard later gave him a trance-side alias. He started DJing in 1984 and came up through the Italian Euro-house group R.A.F. before joining Gianfranco Bortolotti's Media Records as a producer. In 1996 Bortolotti made him a Media partner, and "Bakerloo Symphony" hit #1 in Italy for eight consecutive weeks — the breakthrough that set up the BXR sub-label run. The "reptilian trilogy" is the spine of the catalogue. "Lizard (Gonna Get You)" came first, released on BXR (cat. 1048) in 1998 — Picotto has said he first dropped it on acetate at Ultimo Impero on 7 December 1997, and the released version hit the UK top 30, anchored that year's Gatecrasher rotation, and turned the sliding-arpeggio synth into a permanent fixture of Italian hard trance. "Iguana" followed on BXR 1078 in 1999 (UK #39), and "Komodo (Save a Soul)" landed on BXR 1094 on 16 May 2000 — the UK #13 placing remains his highest solo chart position. "Pulsar" (2000) and "Like This Like That" (2001) extended the run into the early 2000s. He left Media Records in 2002 to launch Bakerloo Music and the Alchemy Records imprint (founded with Riccardo Ferri in 2003) and started the Meganite event brand the same year — a club-party platform that ran for years across Cocoricò Riccione, Ibiza, Miami, and across the global super-club circuit. Picotto continues to release through Alchemy and Bakerloo in 2026 and is regularly booked across the techno-revival mainstage that has rediscovered the percussive hard-trance / techno bridge his late-90s catalogue helped engineer.