Next month, in the Italian city of Palestrina, east of Rome, former members of 90s experimental rock group Morphine will return to the Nel Nome Del Rock (In the Name of Rock) festival in memory of their bassist, Mark Sandman, who died on the same stage while performing with them exactly a decade ago.

It was a shattering event that marred what should have been Nel Nome Del Rock’s tenth birthday celebration. Remarkably, however, it didn’t bring the festival to an end – the band’s saxophonist, Dana Coleman pleaded: “Don't stop everything, Mark wouldn't have wanted that. He lived for the music. He died with the music”. With that, the show went on.

“This was a terrible experience, but it brought us something really special,” recalls Flavio Manieri, one of the festival’s organisers. “It taught us the value of music. When Dana reacted the way he did, we started to realise that there are some very important things in life and music is one of those things.”

Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, Nel Nome Del Rock is flourishing. Its organisers, however, gauge success on a very different scale than the average events company. Manieri and his colleagues, Leonardo Cicerchia, Enrico Lucarelli and Stefano Aleandri, have been so overwhelmed by the help they have received from musicians in running the festival, they have resolved to do it purely for the love of music and donate any small profits made to charity. The festival has survived simply because bands such as Chumbawumba and The Levellers have played for next to nothing.

In October 2007, Nel Nome Del Rock’s sound engineer, Paulo Di Cori, suggested to Manieri that they should take this philosophy and apply it to a rental firm that would put music before money and ‘do it for the sound’. Along with Cicerchia, Lucarelli, Aleandri and Giulio Fiacchi – each of whom had at least 15 years experience in the industry – they formed Sound Divison, with the objective to provide the finest audio they could, to anyone who recognised its value.

“Our dream a year ago was to have the best equipment and team for anyone who would like to have an awesome gig in Rome or the rest of Italy,” recalls Manieri. “Like the festival, Sound Division is independent – it’s all about music. We’re not into the profit logic, we want to have good business, but we’re looking for something else, especially the quality of the audio. We think in this field, the music needs a new boost, some new input, and we would like to be the ones to help this happen. We believe that we can do this through the quality of the audio.”

The firm started out with an Adamson system, which the team believed gave the best response of the big line arrays. However, working in venues of all shapes and sizes, it soon encountered difficulties in consistently delivering the level of audio quality it strived for. Manieri and his friends saw the problems caused by Italian companies who turned down large gigs and made a pledge early on to handle all manner of events, provided the organisers shared their passion for sound.

“We were not really enthusiastic about line array and were looking for a different kind of aural experience,” Manieri recalls. “We believe in the possibility of music through the right means and line array can make your job very difficult in rooms with marble and glass and so on. It is brilliant in the right venue, but point source is much more adaptable and allows you to easliy cover many more spaces. Line array is often used in venues that are not suitable, just because it is easier. Some people believe if it is easier it is better. Especially here in Italy, the situation is quite depressing at the moment.”
Through their obsession with sound quality and quest to find a more suitable PA solution, the Sound Division team discovered Funktion-One, well known for its emphasis on sonic accuracy and a recognition of the emotional effect of music. Manieri and his friends were eventually introduced to the company’s Tony and Ann Andrews, who realised that they shared similar ideas on the importance of superior audio. Before long Sound Division was auditioning a Resolution 5 system, which, Manieri can’t stress enough, was an instant hit.

“We found out about Funktion-One because of our interest and when we met Tony and Ann we thought they were fantastic,” he explains. “We started to listen to their systems and were so impressed that we wanted to buy it right away. We think that music should bring people together to experience the beauty of sound and share the emotion and we hope to be able to make this happen through the quality of the sound system. This is what Funktion-One believes too and we share their philosophy.”

SD’s new Res 5 system is now poised to take on Nel Nome Del Rock in July and the firm has no concerns regarding its ability to do so, having already proven the system at Italian electronic music festival Dissonance, last month. Alongside SLS Event Technology, it deployed the system together with a hefty rack of MC2 E series amps, to amplify the sounds of DJs such as François Kevorkian and Laurent Garnier. The event attracted thousands of fans to the Palazzo dei Congressi in Rome. This type of event is significant for Sound Division because it represents an important stepping-stone between the underground and commercial arenas. 

“At the moment there is a strange situation in over here in the sense that a lot of international artists don’t have an easy time in Italy, so we don’t have a lot of high-profile live music events, especially in this area of Italy,” Manieri explains. “However, we do have a really good underground scene where there is little money but people really do it for the love of music. We started in the underground and now that we are out of it, we are trying to be just a little more commercial and business minded, but we’re sticking to our philosophy of putting the music first and looking for something that will help our job of introducing a new level of sound to Italy.”

The company needs more than just a potent sound system to do this, and so are fortunate to benefit from the experience of some seasoned professionals. Manieri holds his staff in the highest regard and speaks of a baffling number of crew who make up the wider Sound Division team.

Before he returns to his plans for the imminent Nel Nome Del Rock, Manieri emphatically states the company’ mission statement, the underground principles it was founded on: “We’re starting to get some requests for some tours now, but we don’t care about money. We’re trying to make a living too and we care about our investment but we like to do what we do and we want to do it the right way. We know that not everybody is doing it the right way – sometimes because they’re not competent and sometimes because they are looking for something else. We first look to the quality and we think our clients will like that.”
www.sounddivision.it