Cybernetic Boy — Piergiorgio Corallo’s digital alter ego

There’s a reason certain songs feel like mirrors. They don’t flaunt virtuosity; they hold it back. They don’t drown you in metaphors; they choose a few sharp images and let them echo. “Ragazzo cibernetico,” from Piergiorgio Corallo’s project 'In via di sviluppo', is one of those pieces—an electronic rock miniature that uses economy as a form of clarity.

From the first bars, the track commits to proportion. The pulse is electronic but never ornamental; the arrangement is lean, almost architectural. You sense the decision to keep the frame tight: let the voice stand at the center, let the rhythm do the carrying, and let the synth details behave like annotations rather than spectacle. It’s a language of restraint that fits the subject perfectly, because the subject is contemporary perception itself.

The text sketches a figure in fragments. Verse by verse, the protagonist appears under different labels—mediatico, cibernetico, robotico, tecnologico, supersonico—like facets of the same mask. The words aren’t chasing cleverness; they’re building a pattern. The pattern is the point. Repetition becomes diagnosis: identity analyzed by iteration. In the chorus, that diagnostic voice narrows into a single image that keeps returning—“fumo negli occhi” against “luce negli occhi.” Smoke and light, blur and glare. The double filter suggests a world that shows too much and too little at once, a world that dazzles and hides in the same gesture.

This is why the song’s minimalism works. Instead of treating the digital age as an overload of information, it treats it as a narrowing of sensation. The beat is steady and human-sized. The synths feel like air currents in an enclosed room. Guitars—if and when they appear—sit under the surface like a structural beam. Nothing competes with the vocal phrasing, which remains measured, almost documentary in tone. The storytelling is cool, not cold: it watches the character from the right distance, refusing melodrama while still allowing the emotion to seep through the diction.

The third verse flips the lens without breaking the spell. The “ragazza” enters the frame—plastics and beats, tecnologie and supertecniche—mirroring the earlier vocabulary with a subtle shift in rhythm. The choice is smart: the song isn’t a sermon about automation; it’s a portrait of two presences suspended in the same field of forces. By echoing the earlier language, the verse implies a shared condition rather than a counterpoint or an answer. The chorus returns as a verdict, not as consolation.

If you map the song’s structure—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus—you notice how repetition operates on multiple levels at once: lyrical, formal, and emotional. Formally, it anchors the listener. Lyrically, it refines the idea—each round tightens the circle around the theme. Emotionally, it turns into a mantra. In live contexts, that mantra is likely the hook people will carry out of the venue; on record, it becomes the memory trace that binds the piece to the rest of 'In via di sviluppo'.

Production-wise, “Ragazzo cibernetico” is a study in headroom. There’s space in the mix for consonants to land and for the bass to breathe. The dynamics don’t chase the common loudness trick of constant peak; they use micro-swells and timbral changes to keep the ear engaged. The result is a track that translates well across systems: headphones preserve the intimacy of the vocal, small speakers keep the skeleton intact, and larger systems reveal the underlying geometry in the low end without mud.

It’s also a song about touch, or rather, the absence of it. One of the early lines calls out a “ragazzo che non ami il contatto fisico,” and the production answers by leaving skin-temperature elements to the voice while keeping the backdrop hygienic by design. This is not a critique of technology; it’s a record of how technology rewires desire and distance. The image “i sogni che restano sogni” is perfectly placed: it sounds like resignation at first, but the more you hear it, the more it feels like a diagnosis of latency—the delay between wanting and happening in a mediated world.

Because the language is so plain, the song invites a specific kind of listening—the kind that notices proportion. You start to hear where the arrangement refuses to fill gaps, where the lyric chooses a single adjective over three, where the chorus repeats not to inflate emotion but to fix it in place. That economy communicates confidence. It also keeps the path clear for meaning: a listener who comes for the hook stays for the picture of contemporary selfhood the track quietly assembles.

Within In via di sviluppo, “Ragazzo cibernetico” functions as a hinge. Other tracks might push harder into guitars or explore different rhythmic accents, but this one articulates the project’s central tension most explicitly: analog voice versus digital grid; human need versus procedural time. It’s easy to imagine the song near the middle of a set, acting as an axis around which more volatile material can rotate. It stabilizes, not by smoothing edges but by clarifying them.

There are places where expansion would also work—a late counter-melody, a brief instrumental bridge that bends the harmony before the last chorus—but the decision to keep the song compact feels intentional. It treats the core image as sufficient and declines the temptation to decorate it. That’s a mature call. Many tracks about technology collapse under conceptual weight or hide behind glitch as metaphor. This one stays legible. It respects the listener’s attention by giving them exactly as much data as they need to assemble the feeling.

In the end, the song’s most striking quality is its balance: mechanical terms rendered human by cadence, an electronic framework that pulses like breath, an image of smoke and light that works on first listen and still yields meaning on the fifth. It doesn’t argue. It observes. And in a time when many songs shout their thesis, an observer’s voice can cut deeper.

“Ragazzo cibernetico” is not dystopian theater or retro-futurist cosplay. It’s a report from the everyday—concise, repeatable, quietly haunting. It belongs to the city at night and to the morning bus; it plays in apartments where the phone is the first face and the last. If albums are maps, this track is the legend in the corner: a compact key to the symbols the rest of 'In via di sviluppo' will use.

Credits

Title: Ragazzo cibernetico

Author/Composer: Piergiorgio Corallo

Genre: Rock elettronico

Album: In via di sviluppo

Category

Journal

Tags

music, rock, electronic, italianartist, albumproject