Giulio Cesare Ricci: A Life Devoted to Music, Sound and High Fidelity
Interview — #02 Summer Edition
Founder of fonè records, producer and sound engineer Giulio Cesare Ricci tells Max Ishiwata about a path that began very early, when as a boy he recorded sounds and music on a Geloso machine and dreamed of “making records”.
fonè was founded in 1983. Its first album was recorded in an eighteenth-century chapel in Livorno using an Otari 5050 and two microphones. Since then, Ricci’s work has remained closely tied to the natural acoustics of recording spaces, analogue recording and, later, high-resolution digital technologies.
In the interview he revisits his relationship with tape machines, historic Neumann microphones, his experience with Philips and DSD, and above all a philosophy centred on preserving atmosphere, breathing space and silence within a recording.
Looking ahead, Ricci also identifies a human objective: passing his technical knowledge, methodology and experience on to younger generations.
Interview by Max Ishiwata