Gigi D'Agostino
Gigi D'Agostino, stage name of Luigi Celestino D'Agostino[1], is a disc jockey, producer and composer of dance music born in Turin in 1967[2]. Trained in the nightclubs of Turin and the Canavese area between the second half of the 1980s and the mid-1990s, he achieved European success with "L'amour toujours" (1999), and his name became tied to a personal style known as "lento violento."
From building sites to the turntables
Before turning to music he worked as a bricklayer; his career as a disc jockey began in 1986[2]. His path took him through a series of clubs in the metropolitan area: the Woodstock Club, then the Palladio in Cascinette d'Ivrea, on the outskirts of Ivrea, then the Palace at Parco del Valentino, and, in the mid-1990s, the Ultimo Impero, a four-floor discotheque with room for eight thousand people that closed in 1998: a career built entirely on Turin's club scene[3]. According to a reconstruction by the music press in 2001, after producing a mix titled "Psychodelic" he moved to London for a period to hone his craft[2].
He himself is credited with harsh words about those years. In an interview reported by Vice he recalled:
"For me the period between 1993 and 1999 was a very bad one, full of suffering […] I turned all that negative energy that was trying to suffocate me into a search for emotions that were much stronger than the bad ones"
The quote, taken from an earlier interview, appears in the profile written by Elia Alovisi[1].
Early successes and the Brescia school
In the autumn of 1995 Media Records entrusted him with an already existing label, BXR, for his project; he himself recalls its very first releases, numbered 1001, 1002 and 1003[4]. His productions were made at the Media Records studios near Brescia, made available by Gianfranco Bortolotti, together with producer and co-writer Paolo Sandrini, with whom he created around fifteen tracks over roughly three years[3]. His first mass success came in 1996: "Gigi's Violin" closed the year at 56th place in the Italian annual chart after reaching number four, while "Angel's Symphony," credited to R.A.F. by Picotto, finished the year at 66th[5].
"L'amour toujours" and Europe
In 1999 the album L'Amour Toujours was released, divided into two sections, "Chansons For The Heart" and "Beats For The Feet"[1]. The title track had not been conceived as the lead single: it climbed slowly up the Italian and European charts until it became a continent-wide hit. The same week also saw the birth of "Another Way" and "La Passion," while from the same period came "Bla Bla Bla," which Rolling Stone calls a "monstrous collage of voices" and which Sandrini calls "Gigi's creature," and "The Riddle," a dance reworking of a track by Nik Kershaw[3]. Sandrini has described the decisive choice about the arrangement:
"We didn't want to ruin it with a four-on-the-floor kick, and the choice paid off. It was the track that broke Gigi through in Europe."
The interview was given for the track's twentieth anniversary[3]. In November 2001 "L'amour toujours" was sixth on the German chart; the magazine Bravo told a reader at the time that it was hard to write about him because he refused to discuss his private life[2]. By 2019 the video clip had surpassed 200 million views on YouTube[3].
"Lento violento"
D'Agostino later gave a name to his own musical language, slow and insistent, summed up in the album Lento violento… e altre storie; the titles of tracks from this phase, such as "Legna degna" and "Bozza grezza," have been read as small poems[1]. Of the name he explained: "Desire, sex… it was impossible to describe all the sensations, so I packed everything into this term: lento violento"[1]. In 2014, nearly thirty years after his debut, he asserted his independence with a blunt statement: "I have always paid the highest prices to keep my freedom free"[4].
The 2024 German controversy
In May 2024 a video filmed in a bar on the North Sea island of Sylt showed a group of people singing the melody of "L'amour toujours" with the lyrics replaced by a racist slogan. Chancellor Olaf Scholz called such slogans "disgusting," while Interior Minister Nancy Faeser spoke of a "disgrace for Germany." Already in March the label ZYX, which holds the rights, had filed a complaint against persons unknown for incitement to hatred and copyright infringement; after the video surfaced, the Flensburg police announced an investigation into the use of symbols of unconstitutional organizations. According to Der Spiegel, the melody had become so recognizable on TikTok as a racist signal that accounts linked to the Alternative für Deutschland party used it as background music without needing to spell out the slogan[6].
Recent years
In 2023 D'Agostino released the album Slowerland III and has continued to perform live: on September 27, 2025 he held a concert at Fiera Milano Live in Rho[7].
Pages linking here
Sources
- Vice Italia — 13 May 2020
- Rockol — 27 November 2001
- Rolling Stone Italia — 21 August 2019
- Libero Quotidiano — 14 September 2014
- Hit Parade Italia
- Il Post — 24 May 2024
- Milano Pocket