Interview: Giorgio Fazio on Nothing but Simulation

Giorgio Fazio has been developing a practice that moves between music, visual language, and digital world-building. Based in Switzerland, he works from a background in creative direction while using electronic production to open a more personal and unstable space, one where atmosphere matters as much as structure. On Nothing but Simulation, that approach becomes especially clear: the EP is concise, but it is framed as a larger conceptual system built around uncertainty, artificial environments, and the question of what can still feel real inside them.

The release consists of two tracks, Nothing but Simulation and But Something Feels Real, and it has already been introduced publicly through coverage that highlights its interest in the simulation hypothesis, generative digital space, and blurred emotional states. Fazio’s own framing is not about offering a rigid thesis. It is about constructing an experience where sound, images, and thought keep slipping out of fixed meaning. That tension gives the EP its shape and also explains why the project extends beyond audio into a broader visual and online world.

Building a world, not just a release

ROMBO: Nothing but Simulation does not arrive like a conventional debut. It feels closer to a compact environment than a simple EP. When did you realise this project needed to become more than just two tracks?

Giorgio Fazio: From the beginning, I never saw it as only music. I wanted the tracks to feel like the centre of a wider system, something that could hold sound, visuals, text, and a certain emotional instability at the same time. The EP may be short, but for me it was always about building a space rather than simply delivering songs. That is why the project expanded naturally into a digital environment, because the ideas behind it needed a form that could keep moving.

ROMBO: The title already carries tension. Nothing but Simulation sounds philosophical, but also intimate and uneasy. What question were you really chasing while making it?

Giorgio Fazio: I kept returning to a simple but unsettling question: what does it mean to feel something real inside a system that may itself be artificial? I was thinking about simulation theory, but also about daily life online, about the way screens, feeds, and digital layers can start shaping emotional reality. I did not want to explain that idea academically. I wanted to translate it into an atmosphere people could enter.

Sound, image, instability

ROMBO: The EP works less through narrative than through sensation. Its mood is suspended, unstable, and often fragile. Did you begin with emotion first, or with sound design?

Giorgio Fazio: For me the concept always comes first. I usually begin with a feeling or a question, and then the sound starts forming around it. Sometimes that becomes a melody, sometimes a texture, sometimes only a fragment. What matters is that the sonic language stays connected to the emotional world of the project. With this EP, I wanted the listener to feel a kind of imbalance, as if the ground beneath the track was constantly shifting.

ROMBO: Your background in creative direction is strongly present here. The project seems designed as sound, image, and structure all at once. How much does that visual practice shape the way you produce?

Giorgio Fazio: It shapes everything. I do not separate music from image or communication. When I am working on a track, I am already imagining visual elements, textures, movement, maybe even the atmosphere of a website or a piece of artwork. Sound and image grow together. That comes directly from my background, where every element has to belong to the same world and carry the same feeling forward.

Beyond the binary

ROMBO: A lot of electronic music gestures vaguely toward futurism or digital anxiety. This EP feels more precise. It does not romanticise technology, but it does not reduce it to a threat either. Was that ambivalence important?

Giorgio Fazio: Yes, completely. I was not interested in making something that says technology is good or bad. What interests me is the uncertainty, the way artificial systems can still hold emotion, beauty, and vulnerability. That contradiction gives the project its tension. We are already living inside those contradictions every day, so it felt more honest to keep the work open and unstable rather than forcing a fixed position.

ROMBO: The project’s digital extension pushes that idea further. Why was it important for the work to remain unstable even after the music was finished?

Giorgio Fazio: Because instability is part of the core idea. I wanted the project to keep transforming, to feel alive in a way that could never be fixed into one final version. The digital environment gave me a way to extend the EP beyond audio and into an experience that changes from one person to another. If the project is asking questions about simulation, perception, and emotional reality, then the format itself should reflect that uncertainty.

Fragments of a larger vision

ROMBO: Your earlier public music activity suggested experimentation, but Nothing but Simulation feels like a more complete system. Did that change the way you think about authorship?

Giorgio Fazio: It did in some ways. Reworking something existing means you are already in dialogue with a structure that is there. With this EP, I wanted to create the whole atmosphere from the ground up, with its own rules, its own instability, and its own emotional logic. That made the process feel more exposed, but also more personal. It became a clearer statement of the world I want to build through music.

ROMBO: What do you want to leave behind after someone moves through the project, whether through the EP, the visuals, or the online space around it?

Giorgio Fazio: Not an answer. More a disturbance. I would like people to come away with a small shift in perception, a doubt about what feels authentic and what feels constructed, but also an awareness that those two things are not always opposites. If the project opens even a brief space where emotion, image, and thought start to blur together, then it has reached what I was looking for.

Further reading: Obscure Sound’s interview with Giorgio Fazio, EARMILK’s feature on the EP, and the Bandcamp release page.