Michael Angelo (5)

Michael Angelo Nigro (better known as Michael Angelo (5)) is a multi-instrumentalist and session recording artist. He was born in 1954 in Topeka, Kansas but raised in Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

Nigro began with the typically teenage pursuit of fronting his own high school band, Norwegian Wood, and several other short-lived combos followed. His first recording was a 7-Inch acetate for Damon (3) in Kansas City, limited to five copies, with the songs "Journey to Find Who We Are" and "To You". Next, via an ad in a Kansas City newspaper, he happened upon the opportunity of studio work at age 20. During the next few years at the subterranean Liberty Recording Studios (2) - where Michael Angelo (5) - Michael Angelo was recorded in 1976—and Big K Records (where it was mixed in 1977) he worked steadily, recording as a labor of economy during studio off-hours when he was given free reign. The eponymous titled debut LP Michael Angelo (5) - Michael Angelo was released on the Big K Records (3) subsidiary Guinn Records in 1977. It quickly disappeared into obscurity. Years later, record collectors began finding copies of the album and it began appearing on collector's want lists. Since its discovery by fringe-searchers it has been christened a heavy-hitter in the pantheon of “out-of-time” treasures. Self-produced and nearly fully self-created, Michael Angelo is a staggering, hook-filled, inner space hi-fi snapshot of dreamy folk-rock, Anglophile-pop and light psychedelia, filled with contemplative, arresting lyrical imagery and carries little to ally it to its time (spare some shimmering keyboards). It has been reissued four time since the late 1990s, including most recently by Anthology Recordings in 2015.

In the early 1990s he formed a band Synifus with Kansas City musicians Rusty Crewse and Paul Allee and released the album Synifus - Pleasure & Pain on cassette tape in 1991 and Synifus - Deaf In One Eye in 1994. 1999 saw Void Records (3) release an album of unreleased material from the same Michael Angelo (5) - Michael Angelo 1976 recording sessions and Mexican Summer made available two of the tracks on the Michael Angelo (5) - Sorcerer's Delight / Nubian Queen 7-Inch Single in 2010. 2016 saw the reforming of the band Synifus with longtime friends Crewse and Allee, this time calling themselves Michael Angelo's Dreamfeast from the song "Dreamfeast" by Synifus. The band made appearances at the music festivals Montreal Pop and Outer Reaches, performing tracks from the 1977 self-titled album live for the first time ever. In 2017, the group released their first album Michael Angelo's Dreamfeast - Please Don't Wake Me.