okgiorgio

Bergamo, a band, and a decade behind the desk

okgiorgio is Giorgio Pesenti, born in 1996 and raised in the province of Bergamo. He has said that a route into football was realistically open to him and that he picked up a guitar instead, which is about as close as he gets to origin mythology. The first public work came with the band ISIDE, and then he moved behind the desk, writing and producing for Italian pop acts — Pinguini Tattici Nucleari and Fulminacci among them. His publicity material puts the material he has written or produced for others past 100 million streams, and he was, for a stretch, better known inside studios than outside them.

Those years explain his method more than any genre tag does. He describes the studio as a laboratory where instruments that have just been bought or borrowed get switched on to see what falls out, and composition as a process of subtraction — stripping a track until only its skeleton is left. Classical guitar sits underneath sample-based production rather than decorating it, and the reference points he names are largely British: straight kick drums, loops worked past the point of politeness, magnetic tape that has visibly aged.

The hard disk, and a solo project almost by accident

The solo project started in 2022. In 2023 he went back to an abandoned hard disk full of unfinished experiments and voice samples, which supplied much of the raw material, and the debut EP, ok, arrived in December 2023. It passed a million streams and was picked up by Spotify's New Music Friday and Fresh Finds Dance. In April 2024 he was named in Spotify's RADAR Italy class for the year, with his face on the platform's Times Square billboard.

He is candid that none of this was planned in sequence. He has described preferring to move forward half-blind, beginning the whole thing almost by accident after watching what a crowd did with one track. A related piece of evidence: his remix of Ornella Vanoni's "Dettagli", a 1973 song, was played live unreleased for roughly two years before Vanoni herself gave it her blessing. Asked about the inevitable Fred again.. comparison, he has pointed at the bedroom-production habit as the only real connection and said the music itself goes elsewhere.

ko mixtape: a record shaped like a set

ko mixtape came out on 17 October 2025 on daidaidai!, distributed by The Orchard — fifteen tracks, sequenced to be heard in one sitting in the manner of a DJ set rather than as a collection of singles. It compresses two years of playing live across Italy and Europe into one object, electronics and acoustic instruments and vocal samples sharing the same space, in Italian throughout. Credits list okgiorgio and Danio as producers, with a wide spread of co-writers.

The closing track, ko cuore, is the one he singles out: the only actual song on the record, in his description, the thing that arrives at the end of a long set when the night refuses to end and the beat finally slows. Reviewers in the Italian dance press read the mixtape as confirmation rather than a swerve, praising the mix of club propulsion with guitars and melody and its reach across age groups. He presented it with free five-hour sets in Naples, Venice and Milan; the Milan night finished in a back-to-back with fenoaltea.

Clubs, and a step up at Fabrique

The mixtape's proper club run was billed as the Italia Tour 2026: 10 April at Vox Club in Nonantola, 11 April at Hall in Padua, 17 April at Fabrique in Milan, 23 April at Duel Club in Naples, 24 April at Eremo Club in Molfetta, and a close on 29 May at Spring Attitude in Rome, held at La Nuvola. The framing from his own camp was a return to clubs after a 2025 spent largely on festival stages.

Fabrique sold out, and it was the clearest measure of the jump from the smaller rooms he had been playing. The review that followed described a heterogeneous but unified crowd that already knew what it had come for, a long queue, and a production kept deliberately spare — essential lighting, levels that the writer found a touch too polite, and live drums plus rearranged versions separating the show from the records. Between tracks there were few words and no pauses to fill, which the reviewer took as a decision to put the sound ahead of building a personality.

Europe had already been tested. On 13 March 2025 he played a solo show at Kantine am Berghain in Berlin as part of a run billed as okeurope, which also took in dates in the United States.

Dream Samples: the audience as raw material

The next record came out of the tour rather than after it. Across nine sold-out spring 2026 dates in Italy and Europe, okgiorgio recorded audience members telling him their dreams, then sampled, decomposed and rebuilt those recordings in the studio into nine tracks. Dream Samples was released on 26 June 2026. It is not a live album; the stated point is that the barrier between stage and floor stops being decorative when the people in the room supply the source audio. The focus track is "Padova Dream".

Talking in late May 2026, he set out the working principle behind it — a record written, recorded and performed live at the same time, released with no advance singles, each night a one-off with session drummers and a collaborator building loops and samples into something closer to mantras on stage. He is blunt about the mechanics of all this: he does not sing, so the only feedback available to him is whether the room moves, and he has described preferring live shows to DJ sets precisely because he can alter a track mid-performance and find out what an unfinished idea does to a crowd. The summer that followed ran to fifteen dates between 26 June and 12 September across Italy, France, Belgium and the Czech Republic.

Where he stands in October 2026

Two dates are currently on sale, and they are unusual ones. On 5 December 2026 he headlines HERE at Outernet in London, presented by Labyrinth Events and sharing the bill with PARISI, the Grammy-winning Italian electronic duo; on 12 December he plays Estragon in Bologna. Both are billed as the only two airings of a collaborative album that he and PARISI are still making, which makes them previews of unreleased material rather than victory laps for Dream Samples. Songkick currently lists Bologna as the last scheduled date of the run.

The trajectory is legible: a producer who stopped working exclusively for other people in 2022, built a following off two records that behave like sets rather than albums, filled Fabrique in April, and is now running a method — collect material from the room, rebuild it, play it back — that only works if he keeps touring. The question the December shows answer is whether the PARISI material stands up outside the circumstances that generated it.