From playing drums in punk and rock bands in Italy to becoming a producer, DJ and creative force within Berlin’s electronic music scene, FREEGO’s journey has always been rooted in rhythm, movement and authenticity.
Now, with his debut album Vision released through Day Dreaming, the Italian-born artist presents a deeply personal body of work shaped by years of experience both inside and outside the club. Across the album, FREEGO explores the tension between constantly moving forward and simply being present, questioning how much of modern life is spent experiencing reality and how much is spent performing it.
Alongside his work as FREEGO, he is the founder and resident of RE Collective and the driving force behind the wider FREE YOUR EGO concept, which allows him to explore contrasting sides of his musical identity. With appearances spanning Berlin, Ibiza, Mexico and major European festivals, his approach to DJing and production is ultimately guided by the same principle: read the room, trust the instinct and stay in the moment.
We caught up with FREEGO to discuss his musical beginnings, Berlin, the philosophy behind Vision, his evolving artistic identity, and what comes next as he prepares to launch FREE YOUR EGO STUDIOS and make his ADE debut.
You’re originally from Italy and started your musical journey playing drums in punk and rock bands before moving into electronic music in Berlin. How did those early experiences shape the way you approach music today, both as a producer and a DJ?
Growing up in Italy, I started on drums in punk and rock bands before I ever touched a DAW. That’s where the rhythm really lives for me, not something I learned in theory, but something I felt physically, night after night, keeping time with other musicians in a room.
When I moved into electronic music in Berlin, that sense of groove didn’t disappear, it just changed instruments. When I’m producing, I’m still thinking like a drummer: where does the energy build and release? And when I’m DJing, it’s the same instinct I had on stage, reading the room, reacting in real time, adjusting on the fly instead of just running a set list.
Moving to Berlin seems to have been a major turning point in your career. What was it about Berlin’s electronic music scene and club culture that drew you in, and how did your sound evolve after making that transition?
Before Berlin, I was working in Italy as a mechanical 3D modeling designer, a completely different world. I moved here five years ago to study electronic music production, and once I finished my studies, I focused everything on building my artist path: making music, playing in clubs, networking, learning the scene from the inside instead of just visiting it. That’s where the shift really happened.
Berlin’s club culture is built around the DJ set as a long-form, hypnotic experience rather than a track-by-track performance, completely different from where I came from technically, and it forced me to think in a new way.
You’re the founder and resident of Return Collective, as well as part of the “Free Your Ego” concept. What do those projects represent to you, and how do they connect with your own identity as an artist?
RE:TURN and FREE YOUR EGO are two scales of the same idea for me.
RE:TURN is the collective, a return to what techno actually is: body, sound, authenticity, made by and for people, not a performance. Founding it and residing at Matrix gave me a real structure to live off music while staying close to a dancefloor I actually believe in.
It’s also where I learned to think about music as a system: the label, the events, the radio show, all feeding each other.
FREE YOUR EGO is the personal side, split into two voices, FREEGO (emotional, melodic) and EG0 (raw, instinctive), kept strictly separate on purpose.
The name says it: strip away the idea of having one fixed identity, and follow whichever instinct is true in the moment.
So RE:TURN is where I show up for a community. FREE YOUR EGO is where I show up for myself. Both are about authenticity over image
Your new album, Vision, feels like a project with a strong sense of identity and emotion behind it. Where did the idea for the album first come from, and what did you want to express through it?
VISION is exactly what the name says, my vision. It’s my debut album, so before anything else it’s a statement: this is my sound, this is who I am as an artist.
It wasn’t written in one moment. The tracks came together across different periods of my life, and each one carries its own feeling, you can hear it in the titles as much as in the music. Putting them together into one album was about showing the full range of that identity, not just one side of it.
Underneath it all there’s a concept I kept coming back to while making it: we spend so much energy trying to stand out, to be seen, to prove we matter, and less and less time actually living. We’ve forgotten how to just be. It’s hard to slow down in a world that never stops moving, but that’s the only way back to something real. Overthinking the future does the same thing to us as dwelling on the past, it’s just a different direction of the same distraction. Life only happens in the present, here and now.
VISION is my way of asking: who still remembers that?
The album’s themes seem to connect closely with the idea of living in the present and reconnecting with reality. How much of Vision was influenced by your own experiences or reflections on life outside of music?
A lot, honestly. After years of playing out most weekends, late into the night, it’s easy to lose track of what “normal life” even feels like, a quiet dinner, a slow morning, being present without a set to prepare for. The club is supposed to be a place where people are fully in the moment, but it’s often the opposite: everyone filming instead of dancing, showing off instead of actually being there. VISION comes out of that tension, between the world I work in every weekend and the everyday life I sometimes forget how to just live.
How did the process of creating an album like Vision differ from the way you would normally approach an EP or a single? Did having a larger body of work to create change the way you experimented with ideas or developed your sound?
VISION took years to finally come out. Some tracks were done in an hour, others took months. I didn’t set out saying “I’m going to make an album.” I finished the tracks, sat down and listened to all of them together, and that’s when it clicked: I see the vision. I want this to be an album. In general terms, a single or an EP is a sprint. You’re chasing one mood, one idea, and you finish it. An album forces you to think in terms of a journey: what opens it, where’s the emotional high point, where does it come down, what closes it. “Life Has Just Begun” opens the album: groovy, driving, the title says it all. “Who Still Remembers Reality” is the most emotional track and closes the whole thing. Having that arc to build changes how you write. It also gives you more room to experiment inside individual tracks, because each one doesn’t have to carry the whole statement on its own, it’s part of something bigger.
You’ve released Vision through Day Dreaming. What made the label feel like the right home for this particular project, and how important is it for you to work with a label that understands the story behind the music?
It’s through my music that I met Ornery, the label manager. From that very first impression, we already had trust and a shared understanding of what FREEGO sounds like, long before VISION was ever a conversation about releasing anything.
That matters more to me than a label’s size or reach. A label that understands the story behind an album will fight for it differently than one that’s just slotting it into a release calendar. Ornery was the first person who really believed in my project, and he put real love and work into this release.
The first time he heard my tracks, he already said: “I want to release all of them.” Together we decided: this is going to be an album. After our first meeting in the studio, we started working together nearly every week. Being in the studio together that often, we bonded, both as friends and as colleagues. We’ve made a lot of music that hasn’t come out yet.
You’ve played some major venues and festivals across Europe and beyond, from Berlin’s club scene to Mexico, Ibiza, Fairground Festival and World Club Dome. How has playing in such different environments influenced the way you produce and DJ?
Every environment teaches you something different about reading a crowd. Berlin’s club culture is about depth and patience: an audience that will follow you through a long, hypnotic journey. A festival crowd, like Fairground or World Club Dome, is completely different: more immediate, less patient. You have to communicate ideas faster and keep the crowd there with you.
That’s shaped how I produce, too. When I’m in the studio, I try to imagine myself not as the DJ, but as the crowd. Can I dance to this? Can I feel it? That’s what matters to me, and it’s what determines how I build a track to be played out.
But no track does the work alone. Engagement and interaction on stage make just as much of a difference. People will follow you, but only if you read them first, and fast, especially at a festival.
Looking ahead, what are you hoping to explore creatively for the rest of 2026? Are there any new projects, collaborations, releases or places you’re particularly excited about?
A lot is moving. On the FREEGO side, I’ve been making a lot of music with Ornery that we might release soon. On the EG0 side, I’ve got a few unreleased tracks in the works, raw, hard groove material, as well as my live set.
The bigger shift for me this year is FREE YOUR EGO STUDIOS. I joined Riverside Studio, sharing the space with Ornery, and I’m building out mixing, mastering, DJ coaching, and mentoring, which launches its physical operations this September. It’s a new direction: not just making music, but helping other artists sharpen theirs.
On the live side, I’m playing my debut at ADE in Amsterdam on October 25th, with Daydreaming X Equinox, and I’m already planning my next Mexico tour for March next year.
2026 has been about finding my voice as FREEGO with VISION. What comes next is about building something bigger around it.
If you could leave listeners with one thought or feeling after experiencing Vision from beginning to end, what would you want that to be?
I wouldn’t leave them with an answer. I’d leave them with a question: do you still remember reality, and what is reality for you now?
Pick up a copy of FEEGO’s latest album here – https://ffm.to/ddday22