Paolo Angeli was born in 1970 in Sardinia. English Wikipedia gives his birthplace as Olbia; his own Discogs artist profile text states he was born in Palau, a small port town on the island's northern tip that looks out on the Maddalena archipelago, and that he grew up there. Both sources place his childhood in the same stretch of northern Sardinia, and neither is independently adjudicated here, so both are noted rather than one being silently picked.

He started playing guitar at nine, taught first by his father. In 1989 he moved to Bologna, where he began working with contemporary-music ensembles built around collective composition and improvisation. The turn that defined his career came in 1993, when he met Giovanni Scanu, a veteran singer and player of the Sardinian chitarra tradition, who taught him the forms of cantu a chitarra gallurese e logudorese - the old accompanied songs of the island's Gallurese and Logudorese dialects. Scanu appears on voice on Angeli's 1995 debut as a leader, Dove Dormono Gli Autobus (Erosha).

Out of that meeting between Sardinian song tradition and the avant-garde ensemble work he'd been doing in Bologna, Angeli built his signature instrument: a self-modified Sardinian guitar carrying up to 18 strings, described by his own site as "an orchestra-instrument" - part guitar, part cello, part drum kit, fitted with piano-style hammers, foot pedals and motorized, variable-speed propellers that bow the strings. He built the first prototypes between 1993 and 1996 and has continued refining the instrument since. Since 1997 he has toured it at festivals and theaters across Europe, Japan, Australia, the Americas, Russia and Africa; in 2003 the American jazz guitarist Pat Metheny began using a replica of Angeli's instrument, and in 2018 Angeli played Carnegie Hall.

His catalog runs primarily through ReR Megacorp, the London-based label run by Henry Cow drummer and composer Chris Cutler, which has issued the bulk of his solo and duo work since 2003's Bucato. Within that catalog, several records document direct partnerships with jazz musicians: a full duo album with the Sardinian pianist and accordionist Antonello Salis, MA.RI (Auand, 2004), recorded live in Bologna, Ravaldino in Monte and Latina; a run of at least three recordings with the Chicago drummer Hamid Drake, starting with the duo album Uotha (Nu Bop Records, 2005), continuing on the 2010 quartet session Giornale Di Bordo (Sardmusic) alongside Salis and the Sardinian reed player and singer Gavino Murgia, and culminating in the full duo album Đëğhė (ReR Megacorp, 2014); and a 2017 live date, Live At Fasano Jazz (JErec), on which he is the featured guitarist with the Apocalypse Trio and for which Paolo Fresu contributed the Italian liner notes. He has also recorded and performed with the British free-improvisers Evan Parker and Derek Bailey's circle, the American guitarist Fred Frith (whose 1998 Tzadik album Pacifica credits Angeli as one of two prepared-guitar players, alongside Claudio Lanteri, under John Zorn's executive production), the Japanese violinist Takumi Fukushima (Itsunomanika, 2011) and the Czech singer and violinist Iva Bittová (Sul Filo, 2020).

Away from the guitar, Angeli holds a degree in ethnomusicology. He digitized the Archivio Mario Cervo, described on his Discogs profile as the most important collection of Sardinian traditional recordings, and published Canto in Re, a historical study of the cantu a chitarra tradition. With his brother Nanni Angeli, a photographer who has shot most of his album covers, he has served since 1996 as artistic director of Isole che Parlano, an international arts festival held in Palau. In 2005 he relocated his home base to Spain while continuing to tour internationally.

His most recent recordings include the Radiohead reinterpretation 22.22 Free Radiohead (2019, sung in Sardinian), the solo album Rade (2022), a 2023 collaboration with the Sardinian songwriter Iosonouncane (Jalitah), and Vinti 'e Maju (2026), made with the Tenore Murales de Orgosolo, a traditional Sardinian polyphonic singing group.

Angeli's music runs on the tension between two traditions that don't normally meet: the cantu a chitarra singing and dance repertoire of northern Sardinia, learned directly from Giovanni Scanu, and the extended-technique, free-improvisation vocabulary of the European avant-garde, absorbed in Bologna's contemporary-music scene and later shared with figures like Fred Frith and Evan Parker. His own prepared instrument is the literal site of that fusion - a folk guitar rebuilt with a percussionist's and a composer's tools.

Discogs' own genre tagging across his catalog reflects that same split identity rather than a single lane: of 68 individually tagged releases and appearances, 37 carry a Jazz tag, 31 carry Folk, World & Country, and 29 carry Rock - a genuine three-way blend, not a clean jazz catalog with occasional crossover. English Wikipedia's own infobox, for comparison, lists his genres as "Sardinian music, experimental music, improvised music" without using the word jazz at all. His jazz-facing side is real and well documented - the Auand label release, the AllAboutJazz artist page, the Discogs "Avant-Garde Jazz," "Free Jazz" and "Contemporary Jazz" style tags on more than a dozen releases, and direct, credited studio and stage partnerships with Antonello Salis, Paolo Fresu, Hamid Drake and Evan Parker - but it sits alongside an equally real identity as a Sardinian folk-tradition specialist and an avant-rock/RIO-adjacent solo artist on Chris Cutler's ReR Megacorp, plus stated flamenco and Arabic-music influences that never resolved into a single genre label.