Some roads lead more to a destiny than to a destination

You reach a point in life when you realize that some roads lead more to a destiny than to a destination.

When music first seized me, I was only 12 years old. I walked into a small theater that reeked of dampness and cigarette smoke. On stage, a jazz quartet was lit by two spotlights, one on the right and one on the left; the audience was half empty and some of the few people there did not even seem that interested, but those four on stage could not have cared less.

A short man with strange hair was playing a double bass, a bit taller than him.

That was the first time I saw those funny expressions a musician makes while immersed in music, and those knowing glances exchanged with bandmates, as if whispering a secret under their breath.

That was the day music entered my life, like a pure feeling, a secret love you want to protect from ill intentions. That was also the day I decided to become a musician.

Sicily in the early 2000s

After finishing my studies, I started looking for work in the music industry, but in early-2000s Sicily, that was not a job -- it was a hobby; the music business only happened in Milan and Rome. I started working with some music promotion companies, first as a radio promoter and then in management.

I got to know the artistic world that fascinated me so much from up close, but over time, as I learned some of its mechanisms, it disappointed some of my idealistic visions as a dreaming musician. I encountered the kindness and humility of many great artists and the arrogance and conceit of some shooting stars, but meanwhile my experience kept growing.

The intuition

My first state-of-the-art PC had a 4-gigabyte hard drive, and while the coffee brewed in the moka pot, Windows 98 was already ready to connect to the web at 56K.

I had the feeling, or perhaps as many say, the intuition, that sooner or later everything would end up inside that monitor.

I decided to invest in that technology, preparing myself for what would happen a few years down the line.

September 2008

In September 2008, I decided to open a record label entirely based on the web and to go searching for new talent. Many discouraged my idea, saying that others in the past had tried to start a record label without major capital and had soon gone bankrupt. But I did not care.

What name should I give a record label? I am an Italian born in France, with a restless temperament; it sounds like a description of Amedeo Modigliani... Modì... my company will be called MHODÌ!

I built the first website: mhodi.it. I posted some announcements and unexpectedly received hundreds of demos -- many were discarded, but some managed to intrigue me.

The first band I produced did not have great success with the public, but during the making of the music video, the director chose a girl as the lead actress, whom I was not very convinced about... today that actress has become my wife.

Dance again, daddy

Several years have passed since that 2008. That idea born as a game, called Mhodì, over time became a company, with its own productions and international collaborations. We decided to prioritize quality over quantity wherever possible, without the anxiety of chasing the tastes of an audience increasingly less attentive to art.

I owe so much to Music. It has been by my side in good times and bad. It wrote my future, decided my profession, and still today manages to intrigue and move me, like when I pick up my little girl and twirl her around, and she says to me:

Again, daddy, let's dance again.
Of course, Alice Melody.