Italian DJ Claudio Coccoluto, renowned on the international electronic music scene, died Tuesday at the age of 59 in Cassino (south) following a serious illness.
The Italian Minister of Culture Dario Franceschni paid tribute to this
"protagonist of the Italian and international creative scene who with his notes and his avant-garde music made whole generations of young people dance"
.
The mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, for her part, hailed
"a great artist who for more than forty years has marked the history of dance music in Italy, in Europe and in the world"
.
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At thirteen, Claudio Coccoluto had started DJing in his father's appliance store in Gaeta, a seaside town halfway between Rome and Naples.
Coccoluto was the first European DJ to mix his variant of electronic music at the Sound Factory Bar in New York, which he himself called “
underground”
.
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In his popular COCCO program on Italian radio station Radio Deejay, he mixed live while interacting with his listeners.
In the 1990s, the tracks of nightclubs resonated to the sound of his greatest hits:
Do It Whitout Thinkin
,
Afromarslight
,
Mind Melody 3.0
... The release of his latest album, a collection of fourteen tracks, entitled
Imusicselection5 - Vynil Heart
, dated back to June 2008.