VI.BE

Giuseppe Scarano grew up in an era when music had already gone digital — when tracks could be summoned from thin air and entire libraries compressed into a pocket. Yet somewhere between childhood and the first record he held in his hands, something shifted. There was a weight to it. A warmth. A surface that you could feel under your fingertips, as if the music itself had a texture — imperfect, lived-in, real. That sensation never left him, and it became the compass by which everything since has been navigated.

His journey began at 16 in the clubs of Puglia, building a reputation the hard way — through feel, through curation, through sets that moved rooms rather than algorithms. The foundation was house music, the Italian lineage of it, that deep-grooving tradition rooted in Chicago and reinterpreted through a Mediterranean lens. But the obsession was always analogue: the crackle of a needle hitting wax, the irreplaceable warmth of a sound that breathes, the ritual of a format that demands to be handled.

"You can hear the difference. But with vinyl, you can almost feel it — the weight of a groove, the imperfection of a pressing, the physicality of music that exists in the real world."

In 2018, Giuseppe channeled that philosophy into NICEPEOPLE, his own imprint, co-founded to do exactly what its name suggests — platform underground music by people worth knowing, on formats worth owning. The label launched with a four-track EP from Dutch electro legend Orlando Voorn, setting the tone for a catalogue that would refuse to compromise. The second release sealed the imprint's credentials in a single gesture: Scarano's own debut EP, Feel Good, remixed by the late Chicago house legend Paul Johnson — a co-sign from one of the genre's true architects that announced, quietly but unmistakably, that NICEPEOPLE was a label to be taken seriously. The catalogue has since grown to include names such as Boo Williams, Roy Davis Jr., Nico Lahs, Gari Romalis and Gourment De Funk, each release a further statement of intent.

As a producer, Giuseppe has left his mark across some of the underground's most respected imprints. His 2022 work on Cardiology — the Constant Sound sublabel — established his sound firmly in the conversation: deep, punchier than expected, soaked in the filtered disco and Chicago house vocabulary that defines the Italian wave he belongs to alongside names like St. David and Gourmet de Funk. Releases on Disco Disco Records, the Berlin-based vinyl-only imprint with pressings that sell out and hold value, added further weight. In 2024, his Pleasure Dreams EP landed on Skylax Records — one of the genre's most storied Parisian imprints — with the opening track "De Folies" drawing a direct line to Skylax's legendary House de Folies nights at the Folie's Pigalle. Supported by some of the most respected selectors operating in the underground today, the EP sealed his status as a producer whose records travel far beyond the region that made him.

Few milestones measure an artist's international arc more honestly than Amsterdam Dance Event, and Giuseppe's relationship with ADE is one of the most revealing threads in his story. A debut solo appearance in 2018 opened the account. But it was 2019 that marked a genuine leap: Giuseppe brought NICEPEOPLE to Amsterdam in its full form, hosting the label's first ADE showcase with Paul Johnson, Orlando Voorn and Nico Lahs — three names that said everything about where the imprint's compass was pointing. Deep, soulful, rooted in history. The kind of party where the music comes first and everything else follows. In 2021, NICEPEOPLE returned to ADE with a second showcase, this time alongside deep house icon Don Carlos and Nico Lahs — another evening that placed a young Italian label in the company of artists who had been shaping the genre for decades. By 2023, the ADE connection had grown to encompass the release front too: his My Life EP on Fluid Funk was unveiled and presented during ADE week, timed to the moment the global dance music community convenes in one city. And in 2025, the arc reached a new peak — a slot alongside Maceo Plex, Radio Slave, Jen Cardini and Fedele on a night that confirmed his place in a conversation that stretches well beyond Italian borders.

The reach of his music has never been confined to a single circuit. In a relatively short stretch of time, Giuseppe's name has appeared on some of the most credible broadcast platforms: Hör in Berlin, the livestream institution that has become the de facto global stage for underground selectors; Bangkok Community Radio, whose signal stretches far beyond Southeast Asia into an intensely discerning international listenership; Linea in Milan, one of Italy's sharpest curatorial voices in electronic music broadcasting; and Gimic Radio in Brussels, the Belgian platform that champions the kind of deep, purposeful house that Giuseppe has always been drawn to. Taken together, they map a presence that is genuinely global — not the result of industry positioning, but of music that travels on its own terms.

What makes Giuseppe's story compelling is not just where it has reached, but what it represents. He is a child of the digital era who chose to go back — not out of nostalgia, but out of conviction. In a world where music is increasingly frictionless and disposable, he insists on friction: on the ritual of queuing a record, on the imperfection that makes a groove human, on releasing music in formats that demand to be handled. He stands at a rare intersection — native to the digital, devoted to the analogue — and in that bridge between eras, between continents, he has found both his identity and his audience.