Krishna Prema das was born as GiamPaolo Tofani in Florence Italy, 1944. At the age of 16 he started playing guitar following the mood of artists of that time (Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, The Shadows etc.)
In 1969 after different musical experiences in Italy (including the groups “I Samurai”, “I Califfi” ), he found him self in England playing in various clubs in London. At that time he started getting involved with the Electronic Synths of EMS and working on solo productions. He mastered a way to get great sound out of a simple stereo tape recorder.
In 1973 Paolo returned to Italy to join the group named “Area”. During this time he became deeply involved in electronic, jazz, avant-garde, ethnic and classical music with musicians like Stockhausen, Derek Baley, Steve Lacy, Zakir Hussain and many others. His explorative nature brought his life into a radical direction when he became a Vaishnava monk in 1979.
This did not stop his desire to go deeper into the understanding of music, but gave inspiration to go deeper into the root meaning of it, and the connections it has to the spiritual side of the human being.
His intense research lead him to music of the Raga scales and the design and construction of a unique guitar type instrument call a “Tri-kanta Veena”.
The Krsna Vision series started out as the musical sound track we used with our Krsna Vision Multi-Vision 9 slide projector set up. Each piece is a re-arrangement of Vaishnava medieval poems written and sung in either Sanskrit or Bengali.
The musical style in this CD is mixture of World, Fusion, and Classical Orchestral, sometimes very soft and gentle sometimes breaking into a stylized pop, but always orchestrated with a certain delicacy in a way to maintain the original mood of the song. Each album contains a booklet with the English translations of these poems.
Now Krishna Prema produces his music in an endeavor to share his thoughts and realizations as a musician and a man with others.
A more complete autobiography on our web site at:
http://www.krsnavision.com/Personal/Personal-PT.html
and
http://www.krsnavision.com/Personal/Personal-TKV.html
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