ABOUT
Nicolò Bottasso (b. 1994 in Italy, based in the Netherlands) is a violinist, trumpeter, composer and sound artist working across experimental, contemporary and folk-derived music.
His practice centres on improvisation, timbre and repetition, integrating acoustic instruments and live processing into an organic sonic practice in dialogue with moving image, archival material and site-specific performance. He is interested in how inherited musical languages shift when they encounter new contexts and modes of perception.
His long-standing collaboration with his brother Simone as Duo Bottasso has been a continuous laboratory for this practice for nearly two decades.
Since 2024, he has performed on a tenore d’amore, a custom sympathetic-string instrument developed with luthier Cesar Sakellarides, combining features of the baryton violin, viola d’amore and Hardanger fiddle.
Selected presentations of his projects include Eye Filmmuseum (Amsterdam), LAC (Lugano), Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum DFF (Frankfurt), Nonagon Festival (Svanö) and MACRO (Rome).
reviews
“One of the things I admire most about Nicolò is his ability to integrate rapidly and meaningfully within a pre-existing musical context. His improvisational input has been essential to shaping the distinctive character of Caravan. As a musician, he brings not only strong technical skills, but also an open ear and a genuine curiosity that enriches every collaboration”Julian Schneemann
“Postcards from Italy is a dense, intense, and moving project. Contemporary and right”Paolo Fresu
“An artist, but above all a storyteller, who undoubtedly possesses a visceral connection with his inner world, and conveys it to the audience in a way that transcends the physicality of an instrument, without fear of exposing his most vulnerable self: inevitably, whose who listen to him find themselves vibrating in response”Fabiola Tedesco