A Heartfelt Confession in Music — Madness Men and “The One Who Drifted”
- WOMCO
- Aug 17
- 3 min read
Madness Men — Andrea Pallaoro & Luca Berno’s composition, "The One Who Drifted," was awarded the Gold Prize in the Film/Game Music category of the 2025 Season 3 World Master Open Music Competition.
Biography
Madness Men is an orchestral, epic music project that was created in 2019 by Andrea Pallaoro and Luca Berno, two Italian guys that always shared the love for music. We had always done music even before this project, for some small indie videogames such as "Find The Treasure" (entirely created by us) and some other mobile games. We also played music in some live band (Andrea Pallaoro as a pianist and Luca Berno as a Guitarist). We always love soundtracks and epic music, we are a big fan of Hans Zimmer, Two Steps From Hell, Audiomachines and other similar artists. With that project we want to try to take a place inside this beautiful world, and so far this journey gave us 4 albums (the 4th "Elysium" will be released really soon in August 2025!) We are not nearly done yet, we have a lot to learn and even more to say with our compositions!
Could you share the inspiration behind "The One Who Drifted" and the message you hope to convey through it?
The One Who Drifted was intended to be an orchestral piece, but after the first minute of those piano notes we changed our way to approach the piece, and we composed that for an important friend of us who had lost someone important.
This piece message is simple but deep, it starts sad, something that remind a Drift, a man that has lost his path, but then it goes with a more energy and it resolve in a rebirth, in someone that can stand up again.
What was your creative process like while composing "The One Who Drifted"? How did you approach the structure and dynamics of the piece?
Well, to be honest this piece was written in a single night session, it was like the notes and the dynamics inside that track just come out themselves. It was one of those pieces when you don't have to think about the "what's comes next" but they are completely written form a unstoppable inspiration. We only had to do some EQ and minor dynamics adjustment the day after and the piece was done!
Would you like to share your experience participating in our competition and thank anyone?
We discovered WOMCO casually when we were searching for some kind of place to share our music. We were searching for a place to have our music listened from a real competent jury, to understand if our pieces were good to all or just to ourselves.
The experience with Master Open Music Competition was really good and exciting, also because we won the Gold Prize, this was a really happy moment!
We don't have a cool story with a mentor or a huge supporter, we compose music from 2019 and we were always alone, we have made our way out here straight with our hands, we just do music because we like it. By the way we sense the need to thanks all the Master Open Music Competition team and the WOMCO team for what they do for artists like us.
