Band strikes a chord

Musicians more than most have to know the score, literally. And drummer Mattia Cecchetto and guitarist Armen Simon Pour Ahmadabadi know the score. The two Italian musicians played together when they were 3-year-old toddlers. They have performed as a band for almost a decade, and moved to China in 2018, where they worked for different bands, and also wrote and produced songs.

In 2019, they met Alip, a singer-songwriter from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. They hit it off, exchanged contacts and soon after they decided to form a band.

"We've been trying to start a new band, and we already wrote songs. I wanted to have a Chinese singer to join us to write Chinese lyrics, which could help us reach more fans.

"It took us five seconds to realize that Alip was the singer we were looking for," recalls Cecchetto.

"It's interesting that even if we and Alip grew up in two different parts of the planet, we realized that we were listening to the same music when we were teenagers," says the drummer, adding that they also like Alip's song voice and performing style.

They named the new band Titian after the name commonly used by Tiziano Vecelli, the Venetian painter during the Renaissance. He was Alip's favorite painter.

The band enjoyed a breakthrough after performing in the reality show, Strawberry Man, which was launched by Modern Sky and premiered on July 16 at online streaming platform Youku. Titian is among the 24 indie rock bands competing in the show.

"We were pretty excited, Titian is a new band and have the opportunity to be part of a TV show. It can be a huge exposure especially in a country like China," says Cecchetto, adding that the recording of the first three episodes were "terrible" since the band had never been in front of cameras and "the stress was very high".

"Fortunately after the third episode, we finally felt more confident, and we started to have a lot of fun," he adds.