Daniele Pagliero is a Turin-based musician active since the late 1990s, known for constantly exploring musical borderlands, spanning from electronic and experimental music to noise and extreme metal. Genre contamination is the unifying thread of his work.
Lo Dev Alm is the moniker under which he has been creating electronic music since the early 2000s. The name derives from an industrial machine error message and embodies the project’s goal: transforming machine noise and software errors into structures and melodies.
Over the years, he has collaborated with Frammenti, Daniele Brusaschetto, Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo (Larsen), Ben Chasney (Six Organs of Admittance), Julia Kent, Paul Beauchamp with the band Space Aliens From Outer Space, Stefano Giust and, Evan Parker (Setola di Maiale Unit), Alberto Novello (Jestern), and Gabriele Mitelli.
(pic by Arianna Carotta)
Author notes
“[…] those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their eff orts; even if their eff orts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death.”
This line from the introduction to Stephen King’s Night Shift strikes me as fitting: a need that becomes an obsession with creating and building.
I hate writing in the third person, so I’ll try something diff erent: I’ll write you some very personal, intimate notes.
Computing and music have always intersected in my life. Fortunately, at least one of the two gives me a steady job and, to a certain extent, satisfies a creative need, off ering tools to realize ideas in a lucid, systematic way. The other is a diff erent story altogether: a pressing necessity to express the inexpressible which, in the act of creation, leads to a moment of inner, meditative inquiry.
Electronic music is where these two aspects meet: on one side, the rigor of machine language used to build sound; on the other, the chance to experiment within the errors of that syntax and lose myself in the emotions those errors produce.
All of my work as an electronic musician is based on this idea, and this latest release is yet another chapter of it, perhaps with a more mature awareness.
This record had a very long gestation, which began unknowingly in 2024 while I was working on another project (La Fortezza Del Suono, an artist residency I had the honor of taking part in). I started collecting material while practicing improvisation on a very reduced modular system based on granular synthesis. Some of those takes began to resonate with me, and I listened to them obsessively until, many months later, I started reworking and extending them with new material, always using the same approach.
At that point I selected the most promising parts and began editing them together to hear the whole. The result seemed too naive and hermetic, and I felt the need to make it more communicative.
So I began thinking about composing melodic lines and drum machine patterns, closer to IDM and industrial, on top of this “sonic dust.” After several experiments, I began to feel that these new parts sounded naturally complementary to the drones and background noises I had made earlier.
That’s where the idea for the title DVN came from: a contracted version of “Divination”. In some ways, this was a process of interpreting phenomena.
So I finished the composition with a single constraint: the whole record would be tuned to D (or Re), and each track would use a diff erent mode or scale (major, minor, pentatonic, and so on). You can listen to the result here.
Please don’t ask me what my music sounds like or who the audience might be. I can try to point you in a direction by mentioning Boards of Canada, NIN, Scorn, Autechre. These days I find references harder to come by, so I’ll add Pye Corner Audio and Oneohtrix Point Never.
The audience that might be interested in this music is completely unknown to me. I believe it exists, and I hope it understands the genuineness of what I do.
I won’t hide that recognition from an audience, however small, means a great deal to me and eases my imposter syndrome.
Finally, heartfelt thanks to Vincent, Roby, Andy and Plasman for believing in this project and for releasing it through their labels.
Turin, September 26, 2026
