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Fredo Viola doesn't need much. Give him a Nikon Coolpix 775 camera and he'll make you a video (a few 15 sec. jpg movies oughta do it). Let him talk gibberish and he'll give you a lyric. Show him a broadband connection and he'll show you a worldwide community of bedroom blog-boffins who are his dearest collaborators, even if he's never met them. If he fires up his synthesiser he can whip up a techno-orchestra. And if he lets free his voice, then loops it, then layers it, then folds it in on itself, Fredo Viola can create pop music that makes the tips of the hairs on your ears go waaaaah.
So, Fredo Viola doesn't need much. But then, this London-born Italian-American electronica-poet had a tonne of stuff -- ideas mostly, some lovely, some lofty, some wired, some weird -- to begin with. He also knows how everything links up. How, when you're working towards making magic music, everything counts, and not just in large amounts.

Fredo Viola was born in London -- his American dad, a maker of commercials, was based in the UK while he produced his first film. But Viola spent most of his early childhood in Los Angeles, where he studied violin and piano, and was a pre-adolescent soprano.

His teenage years in California were spent hoovering up the bleepier margins of the British Invasion, from Depeche to Art Of Noise, with a whisper of Kate Bush thrown in. Ah, the uplifting power of sex'n'circuitry and baroque'n'roll.

Having entertained notions of becoming a painter and a musician, Viola realised what he really wanted to be was a filmmaker. New York University's Film School were only too happy to accept him, although the teenage Viola's blithering passion for Fellini and 'formal film-making' probably helped his case.
'But I was tormented in college,' Viola admits cheerfully. 'I got really into Bartók and Shostakovich and Stravinsky.'

He began writing his own music whilst living in Massachusetts and Woodstock. Just him, his voice and Logic (you know, the non-linear digital audio sequencing programme). He stumbled across a website called em411.com, a global clubhouse for electronic music enthusiasts.
He began collaborating with his fellow-techno-travellers on em411.com, and he made a video for 'The Sad Song', using just his little-bitty digital camera. He got thousands of hits on his website -- www.fredoviola.com. Some em411.commers suggested he email it to a couple of graphic design companies. He did, and one of those companies went bananas for it, writing about it in their blog. Then Neil Gaiman wrote about it and that really knocked it insane. A 15-sec snippet of one of his songs was used in the soundtrack to his Manchurian Candidate remake. That pricked up the ears of movie-spotters. Big-ass critic Roger Ebert wanted to show it at the Mac Expo.

Massive Attack emailed and asked him to collaborate. They sent him ten rough tracks, then flew him to Bristol to work on some ideas. He hooked up with their management, landed a publishing deal, and a record deal with Because.

'I'm a really emotional person and most of the songs come from emotional states. 'My songs are fantasies, they take you away from reality. I'm just not a big fan of reality, never have been,' says Fredo Viola, who doesn't need much but dreams a lot. No wonder his pop music is so special.