Flavour Sperimentale is an Italian experimental music project, active since 1997 and founded in Acquasparta by guitarist Nicola Cruciani, along with bassist Paolo Feliciotti, drummer Francesco Francia, and keyboardist Giovanni Armadoro. In 1998, keyboardist Alessandro Regno temporarily joined the group, replacing Armadoro, who later returned to the project.
Over the course of almost thirty years of activity, marked by constant sonic exploration and sporadic live performances, the project underwent numerous changes in both lineup and style, releasing several albums and various collateral works. After an initial phase as a live band, the group evolved in 2005 into a musical laboratory led by Cruciani, with influences from avant-garde and psychedelic music inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage. In the following years, it alternated instrumental productions, concept albums, and collaborations—including one with Vincenzo Lardo (aka 240bpm)—until concluding its activity with two works by Cruciani published between 2024 and 2025.
History
Origins and Foundation
In September 1997, at the end of a rehearsal session of the cover band Noises Off—a lineup that included keyboardist Giovanni Armadoro and guitarist Nicola Cruciani—drummer Francesco Francia and bassist Paolo Feliciotti also joined for spontaneous improvisations. From these jam sessions, characterized by a free and experimental approach, the idea to create a new musical project, called Flavour, was born.
The quartet immediately developed a sound language based on extended improvisations, with strong psychedelic and experimental tinges, performing exclusively original material live. After a brief series of concerts, the lineup dissolved around the year 2000, temporarily interrupting their activity.
After four years of inactivity and several failed attempts to reform the band, Cruciani decided to relaunch the project, keeping the original name but adding the word Sperimentale (Experimental) to emphasize the orientation towards a sometimes radical sonic research.
This new phase took shape in 2005 with the album ZU, inspired by the prepared piano techniques typical of avant-garde music. The following year saw the release of Elektronische Musik, a work that, while maintaining an experimental imprint, explored electronic sounds more deeply. These two albums marked the official restart of the project and defined its new artistic identity.
In parallel, Cruciani undertook other initiatives, including remote collaborations that led to the creation of the Flavour Lab, as well as productions released under his own name or under the pseudonym Bar Psichedelico. All these works converge in a netlabel, also named Flavour Sperimentale—an archive and reference point for the entire body of work connected to the project.
In 2007, the digital version of I Maius MCMXCVIII was made available on MySpace—until then exclusively distributed on self-produced CD—containing the recording of a 1998 concert by the original lineup and a home-recording track by Cruciani and Francia.
The Pink Trilogy (2008–2010)
After some productions created within the Flavour Lab, Cruciani returned to releasing a series of works under the name Flavour Sperimentale, inaugurating a phase strongly inspired by the psychedelia of Pink Floyd from the 1968–1970 period and the free-form structures of krautrock.
A Provision of Mirages (2008) explored sonic landscapes suspended between a hypnotic, almost mantric rock, and more airy melodic openings. The album was distributed digitally via the MySpace platform, maintaining a deliberately independent and self-produced approach.
Madamadama came out in 2009, a work that emphasized the acoustic component and introduced elements of more classic psychedelia, while still retaining experimental and Improvisation inserts.
Closing the triptych, Queen Moo Breakfast was released in 2010, characterized by compositions with a more elaborate harmonic structure. The album merged psychedelic, progressive, and avant-garde influences.
These three works, conventionally grouped under the name "Trilogia Rosa" or "Trilogia Sperimentale" (Pink Trilogy or Experimental Trilogy), marked a new phase in the project's evolution, consolidating its identity and expanding its musical language.
The Collaboration with 240bpm and In No Man’s Land (2017)
Following the Experimental Trilogy, Cruciani embarked on a new compositional period, releasing various albums as Bar Psichedelico, and Flavour Lab. These productions explored a wide spectrum of sonic languages, ranging from ambient music to serial minimalism, up to forms of radical experimentalism.
While preparing #, an album based on field recording techniques, Cruciani met the Salerno-based artist Vincenzo Lardo, aka 240bpm, who had just released Welcome, a Pink Floyd tribute album. The meeting marked a new and significant turning point: from the rarefied and abstract atmospheres of ambient and sonic research, the project shifted towards structures closer to the song form, with a more marked balance between text and music, featuring shorter instrumental sections functional to the lyrical narrative.
This collaboration gave birth to the monumental project In No Man’s Land, a sweeping concept album that, through the four natural elements, addresses the universal theme of the search for the meaning of life. Published in October 2017, the work unfolds as a synesthetic journey between philosophy and music, enriched by a film accompanying the complete listening of the album.
Despite being entirely self-produced and lacking traditional distribution, In No Man’s Land received positive feedback, also thanks to the diffusion of music videos on social media, which helped consolidate its status as an unconventional work of authorship.
Developments and Returns (2018–2021)
In 2018, Flavour Sperimentale returned to a markedly experimental approach with the album Эхо Космоса (Eko Kosmosa), which embraced the tradition of German kosmische Musik and was characterized by long, hypnotic instrumental tracks, synthetic textures, and extended space-ambient atmospheres.
Concurrently, the music of In No Man’s Land was adapted for a theatrical production in the form of a musical, directed by Vincenzo Lardo and staged by the student collective of the "Severi" High School in Salerno. The show debuted on May 18, 2018, and was later proposed as a European project aimed at promoting the culture and values of brotherhood expressed in the work. Despite the interest generated, the initiative was not completed.
In 2019, the original Flavour Sperimentale lineup reunited to record a track and a music video intended for a local electoral campaign. Although the reunion proved to be short-lived, the produced material was included in Say Goodbye to Winter, a compilation that paired studio recordings with live takes from rehearsals featuring the characteristic improvisations that had defined the group's beginnings.
In 2019, Cruciani began working on an album in collaboration with 240bpm. However, the COVID-19 pandemic slowed the project, leading Cruciani and Lardo, during the lockdown, to channel their energies into another initiative: together with composer Marco Grieco, they formed the project M.E.N., culminating in the album Spillover, a progressive rock concept with complex structures and highly topical themes, whose release, however, only took place in October 2024.
Meanwhile, Giovanni Armadoro embarked on an independent compositional path, creating a series of studies and sonatas for piano that further expanded the stylistic range of the Flavour Sperimentale catalog. The result is Small Songs for a Smile, published in July 2021, entirely written and performed by Armadoro.
Also in September 2021, You Were All Here was released—a psychedelic but more melodic and introspective album, composed by Cruciani with constant supervision and key contributions from Lardo. While maintaining elements of experimentation, the work stood out for a more narrative and cohesive approach, marking a further evolution in the project's musical language.
Recent Years (2023–2025)
After a break of about two years, in July 2023, Cruciani reunited with former bandmates Francia and Feliciotti with the aim of revisiting the psychedelic derivations that characterized the origins of Flavour Sperimentale. Armadoro did not take part in the project, while Alessandro Regno—keyboardist of the band in 1998–1999—returned, adding new timbral nuances to the live performances.
The renewed lineup held a brief series of concerts, but this Réunion was also short-lived, leaving as the only testament the recording of a performance at Palazzo Cesi in Acquasparta, published in November 2023 with the title Live at Water Fest II.
Having definitively closed the experience with the band, Cruciani dedicated himself to a more contemplative solo project, culminating in the album The Infinite Horizon. Characterized by instrumental tracks imbued with an elegiac atmosphere and more intimate tracks.
In 2024, Cruciani began a new collaboration with Vincenzo Lardo and a group of Salerno artists, giving life to the unreleased project La Giduglia, published under the pseudonym Nik & L’Accademia Patafisica del Bar Nessuno. The collection of songs, entirely in Italian, explored contaminations between pop, folk, reggae, and blues.
In 2025, Cruciani selected a series of tracks and outtakes excluded from the most recent productions and published A Fleeting Sense of Perception.
In October 2025, he revisited the conceptual universe of In No Man's Land with the release of In NM Land (Naked Mix), a stripped-down reinterpretation that emphasized the raw emotional core of the original work through minimal arrangements. Alongside this, around October 2025, he released four ambient albums—Hydrophonia, Onirica, Odissea Interstellare dell'Aringa Rossa (Interstellar Odyssey of the Red Herring) and Didascalia per un Gesto (Caption for a Gesture)—each exploring distinct soundscapes ranging from aquatic textures, dreamlike atmospheres, cosmic journeys, and abstract narratives.