Who is S2D01
S2D01 is the music project founded by Simone Cappelli.
Italian musician, sound designer and experimenter, Simone brings more than forty years of experience in sound, music and technology into S2D01.
Simone Cappelli
Simone developed an instinctive relationship with sound, light and technology from an early age. Music arrived early, together with a curiosity for radios, amplifiers, instruments and electronic equipment.
During his formative years, he moved through guitar, piano, private radios, tape editing, DJ sets and early technical experiments. His way of working did not come from a linear academic path, but from listening, practice, error and direct construction.
In the 1980s, he marginally entered the Florentine music scene shaped by New Wave, Dark/Gothic, synthesizers, drum machines and effects. After a period living in Paris, he returned to Italy and trained as a theatre sound technician in a course that also included lessons by Hubert Westkemper.
From there, he entered the theatre of the second avant-garde, working with experimental theatre, multimedia research and physical theatre companies, including Krypton by Giancarlo Cauteruccio and Compagnia dell’Albero by Yves Lebreton.
He worked on sound, lighting, video and multivision systems, taking part in international contexts connected to visual and performing arts, including Documenta in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, the Linz Festival and the Winnipeg Mime Festival. The long collaboration with Yves Lebreton brought him into a physical and bodily form of theatre, where light, movement, rhythm and stage presence became central parts of the work.
Composition
In the 1990s, his work moved increasingly toward electronic composition. The arrival of early sequencers, MIDI and then Cubase on Atari opened a new way of building music: themes, variations, layers, racks of synthesizers, effects and soundtracks for theatre, events and multimedia productions.
In the early 1990s, Michael Nyman’s music for Peter Greenaway’s films left a deep mark on him. Those repetitive and orchestral structures shaped an important part of his way of composing: simple themes, progressive variations, accumulation, emotional tension and transformation of form.
Between 1995 and 1996, he worked as lighting designer on the tour of The Hothouse by Harold Pinter, in the adaptation directed and performed by Carlo Cecchi. From 1996 to 2000, after moving to Milan, he worked with Laser Entertainment as a laser, audio and lighting technician, also taking care of the company LAN, Internet connection, internal server and network management.
During the same period, he composed soundtracks for events and worked occasionally as lighting designer with Teatro Grande di Brescia and Teatro Bellini di Cremona for productions, stagings and tours of the Lombard opera season.
Still today, many S2D01 tracks start from a precise emotional core: a moment, a fracture, something that stays with you. The initial theme is repeated, shifted, processed and transformed, until it becomes a complete structure.
S2D01 today
In the early 2000s, he returned to Tuscany and carried on parallel work across web, graphics, digital systems and professional audio, creating websites, online platforms and a server dedicated to the audio world.
From 2009 to 2013, he lived in the Philippines, where he continued to compose tracks that would later be released on digital platforms.
In 2015, he returned to Italy. The following year, he rebuilt a small audio studio and founded S2D01, also as a way to give shape to sound again after a difficult period.
Since 2020, S2D01 has become the center of Simone’s work: a place where composition, sound design, sonic memory and technology meet without belonging to a single genre.
S2D01 was not born as a project built on paper. It carries decades of music, theatre, radio, stage work, electronics, web, losses, returns and transformations.
Alongside music production, Simone also develops MOODS, a generative sound design engine for macOS. S2D01 remains the personal and musical project. MOODS is its software extension: another way to continue the same research into sound. Beyond the tracks. Beyond music.
Name origin
S2D01 comes from “Studio1”.
The name refers to Studio One, the historic Jamaican studio and label connected to Clement “Coxsone” Dodd.
For Simone, the reference is not only musical. It is the idea of the studio as a living place: a space where recording, memory, technology and sound identity meet.