Angelo Bruschini, the English guitarist best known for his work with Bristol trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack, has died after a battle with lung cancer.
Massive Attack confirmed Bruschini’s death on social media, writing, “RIP Angelo. A singularly brilliant & eccentric talent. Impossible to quantify your contribution to the Massive Attack canon. How lucky we were to share such a life together.”
Bruschini’s wife wrote on Facebook that he died Oct. 23 at 12:15 a.m. “from a rare and aggressive cancer — pleomorphic carcinoma.” Over the summer, Bruschini shared a note on his own Facebook page about his diagnosis, writing, “Twice now I have been told ‘Good luck’ by specialist’s at the hospital over lung cancer, I think I’m fucked! Had a great life, seen the world many many times, met lots of wonderful people, but the door is closing, think I will write a book.”
Bruschini was raised in Bristol and got his start in the Eighties and spent about a decade playing with the ever-evolving rock/new wave group, the Blue Aeroplanes. In the mid-Nineties, he was asked to sit in on a Massive Attack session, but as he recalled in a 1999 interview (archived via a Massive Attack fansite), he left the studio “thinking I’d been dreadful, bloody awful.” He didn’t hear anything for several months, but when Massive Attack released their celebrated 1995 album Protection, Bruschini quipped, “I just happened to recognize quite a few samples!”
Not long after, Massive Attack asked Bruschini if he would tour with them. He accepted the gig, thinking, “To play that kind of music would be a challenge. I was getting a bit bored jangling away on the indie scene, and this seemed like a way of getting into more modern computer music.”
Bruschini joined Massive Attack in the studio again for their next album, 1998’s equally acclaimed Mezzanine. The LP hit Number One in the U.K., was certified two times platinum, and featured several hit songs, including “Teardrop” and “Risingson.” Bruschini also played on Massive Attack’s 2003 LP 100th Window and the band’s 2004 soundtrack for Louis Leteerrier’s film Unleashed. After that, Bruschini continued to play live with Massive Attack, though he did not appear on any more of their studio recordings.
In that 1999 interview, Bruschini highlighted the crucial quality his guitar playing brought to Massive Attack’s innovative sound, which was largely based around samples and other electronic elements.
“Humanity,” he said simply. “While we were doing the album [Mezzanine], we were sticking stuff through my amps all the time just to mess it up; one problem with the digital domain is that it’s too clean – even the bass. You can have the pure source of the sounds, but we want to screw them up and the best way to do that is to use analogue things, like a guitarist.”