Concrete Shelves

Concrete Shelves is on hiatus

As you all may have noticed since our latest post on January 2020, this website is not really operative. Don’t be desperate: I’m fine and I’ll maybe back one day in exploring other people’s houses conversating about records, books and life in general. But I’ve decided to use my time and energies for other activities,…

Gareth Davis – “I have a huge appetite. Doesn’t matter if it is music, cinema, books, design, dance, food or anything else”

I see some nice box on top of one shelve: Magnolia Electric Co, an unknown (to me one) and David Thomas, and many CDs also of Pere Ubu elsewhere. Are they particularly important for you? On that shelf is the Magnolia Electric Company “Sojourner” box, Deathprod, then “Jewelled Antler Library” and David Thomas “Monster”. The…

Fabio Perletta – “When I see a sculpture or listen to a piece of music and you immediately feel the urgency to turn on the laptop or other instruments to make something new”

Minimalism and order. These are the main words that come to my mind when I see this picture of the posters, and the empty spaces between things you seem to like. Both visually and musically you seem to go in this direction. What drove you there? Yan Jun said here on our blog a funny…

Mára / Faith Coloccia – “I am very interested in “the body”. The human body, or the bodies of plants, lichens, slime molds, how bodies interact”

I see in the picture you on a mountain, among boulders and weeds. If I guess, you’re breastfeeding a child. That’s a lovely picture for an artist, in my opinion, and thousands miles away from many aggressive-sexy female press photos, often not so rare even in the experimental music field (not to mention pop and…

Sandro Perri – “Some of my recordings are like a mosaic of the history of the song”

Funnily enough, when we ‘met’ in 2006, I asked you about potential inspirations in “Like Heart Swelling” from the Penguin Café Orchestra, and you told me that you.. “…do like what I’ve heard of Penguin Café, but they are not an influence in any way. In fact it was another Italian journalist, Stefano Quario, who…

Alessandro Ciccarelli – “The physical experience is a fundamental component for me, in an organicistic, fluid conception”

I see trumpets and pieces of trumpets (oil, mouthpieces, mutes…) more or less everywhere. I’ve recently interviewed Greg Kelley of Nmperign, I don’t know if you know him, by the way I told him about the choice of playing that instrument, that is actually also the only one I more or less play. It demands…

Federica and Andrew (Kitchen Legs) – “We’ve changed our tastes over time, but even the most ridiculous music choices one might have made back in the day shape who you are now”

It’s pretty clear that you like cassettes, both as publisher of music, and as listener(s)! But what is nice and strange is to see so many ‘mainstream’ releases on cassettes, survived after all of these years, like Grace Jones, Prince… You know, it’s rare. I saw for instance many still having their dubbed cassettes, musicians…

Manuela Benetton – “After 15 years in Berlin, I am more interested in a place that it is human, has energy, where people have interesting and intelligent things to share”

Cool! “Storia della filosofia indiana” [“History of Indian Philosophy”] and “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex” are the first two books that I see! Sign of a twisted personality? Funny that one is in Italian and the other one in German. I know you live in Berlin since a lot of time… I suppose you like the…

Norman Westberg – “I don’t think that my tastes have changed that much in my life, only expanded somewhat”

1 – The first picture you took shows an awesome set of cassettes. There’s really none I could barely know or recognize, especially those with Arabic (?) names. In my (maybe pathetic) attempts of guessing from where they come from, I saw dates (I guess): “95 Plus”, “Latest 96” (twice). It’s funny as, if I…

Elena Botts – “I thought it would be a shame to listen to so much music and never make any”

I see very diverse things together, like LPs, but also old (lovely) VHS, and what seems to me boxes of video-games. I suppose that you are somehow influenced by all of these things, right? You are really into cinema maybe? Tell me about how you started to play music. How is Mourning Dove born? The…

Derek Piotr – “You are either ‘feathers or fur’, and I am certainly feathers… as far as birds go… undeniably friendly, not too large, not too small”

Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich and other minimalists… You’re not the first in this filed here on CS, but I always like to explore what does ‘minimalism’ mean to people, in your case both as listener and as musician… Pärt and Reich were very important to me early on in my listening days (16-18). Morton Feldman…

Greg Kelley – “I tend to like things that are in between the cracks and haven’t yet been codified”

I love the totally different shelves/boxes/furniture where the records are stored. It’s funny, they even look like if they’re from different houses. I suppose you don’t care about having ‘stylish’ things around, like for instance Robin Rimbaud/Scanner, whose red shelves were very appreciated by some of our readers… Over the past 20 years, I’ve…

Nigel Ayers – “You don’t have to learn anything to do art or music. You learn by doing them. They are the most natural things to do in the world”

I must admit it’s hard to avoid to ask “what the hell is this?” for most of the pictures you sent. But I’ll try. What the hell is this sort of robot made with (I suppose) effects? I was really fascinated by the ‘gadgets‘ on your website, especially “The Exterminator” and “Ideal Husband Ideal Wife”…

FS Blumm – “It’s hard to concentrate on the cooking while listening to Geeta Dutt”

I love mystery. You took pictures of a pair of boxes marked as “dub” and with the Olympic circles. What’s inside? Relics of an unknown past, LPs of real dub music, 7 inches you kept from your youth…? I just changed my address and I only took very, very few records with me. I sold…

Loscil / Scott Morgan – “Is the new album a distraction from the perils of the world? No, I don’t think so but if it serves this purpose for anyone, then I’m content with that”

At a first overall shallow look, I notice a pair of books about birds, another one on water, and then “Vegetarian” (maybe a cook book?). I also see stuff about Canada and British Columbia, I know you live in Vancouver… If I think of your art, including the covers of albums like “Monument Builders”, “Suns”,…

Aidan Baker – “There is so much more music now and it is so much more readily available, that it takes more effort to glean out that which is worthy of attention and appreciation”

I hope this will not sound as an offense, but your set of records looks like one of the most tidy and structured I’ve seen through this blog. I’m not referring only to the fact that all records seem to be put in strict alphabetical order, but I get some sense of ‘balanced organization’. Your…

David Grubbs – “Last year I started to throw out a batch of hardcore punk compilations and demos but a friend thankfully brought me to my senses”

I need to ask you about one close up you choose to send me, that seems to show LPs from “F” to “H”. I wonder why you chose that, but my first though was: “It’s for John Fahey, uh!?” Working here for Concrete Shelves, I keep noticing some recurring name in shelves and conversations, and…

Colin Herrick – “I seem to have come to the conclusion that I would rather take old books, disseminate them, and turn their parts into other objects of beauty that more people are able to share!”

Even a video? Cool, thanks. You know I’ve never heard of this band/duo? This tiny excerpt playing from your turntable sounds in fact very attracting… I’ll check it out. It surprise me that you have a favourite of all the times! Not everybody has one. Could you tell me more? Firstly: the duo Deux Filles…

Paolo Bertoni – “It seems to me very wise to be afraid of happiness, in fact romantic soul prevails over every other aspect, obscure and catastrophic too, of myself”

What is “Scared to Get Happy”? It’s funny, as it somehow fits with the (most probably stereotyped) image I’ve got of you: as a journalist, I see that 90% of the stuff you write about is not really considered ‘happy music’: industrial, gothic, dark, experimental, isolationism, concrete… I often asked myself if you – like…

Yann Novak – “I am encouraging the audience to misinterpret me in exchange for their own deeper, more personal relationship to the work”

The first shot shows a beautiful golden (painted, I suppose) amplifier with a statue (Buddha?) on it. Where does it come from? You did it? It’s gold leaf! That is actually a piece my partner Robert Crouch made years ago that I just love. The Buddha was a gift from my mother. I have casually…

Riccardo Gorone – “Taste doesn’t often reflect the beauty and the width of music, so, in my opinion, is not the right criteria to listen to music”

I see interesting gear around, like the two amps beside the turntable. What are they? They are a sort of work of art. The little speakers are made of ceramic. They generally born in one colorway, but with the customization of a local artist, these became unique pieces. I have to pairs: one in yellow…

Benjamin Finger – “Most of the albums you see in the basement had a rough life, some of them have even lost their normal shape. But I have bought new copies of most of them, those that I could still find”

I see quite a lot of albums I like, including the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch “Dead Man”, for me one of the best album of Neil Young. I’ve listened to your collaboration with Mia Zabelka and James Plotkin, with great dark reverberating atmospheres, slow guitar tunes on the first side… I see a sort of…

Thorsten Lütz – “The finanical was only an irrelevant fact. The main thing was that running a record label was and still is fun”

I see a lot of Karaoke Kalk in these images, in these LP covers you wanted to show me: irony, arty things, kitsch, pop culture and experimentation at the same time, a little bit of darkness and pure enjoyment. Do you agree that these terms relate to this LP covers and their music and…

Darren McClure – “I don’t think noise and ambient are mutually exclusive genres at all. In fact, it’s that distortion and texture that accentuates the emotional aspects of the music for me.”

Crass, Napalm Death, Carcass, Godflesh… a lot of Earache and Southern Lord! Delicate, dreamy, minimal tunes like the ones you usually play in your albums. Or not? Well, are these listenings from your past or do you still have that side in you, maybe not expressed directly in your music? The Earache stuff is a…

Chris Forsyth – “I’m pretty deadly sincere, musically, but I have a lot of mixed emotions and a very sarcastic sense of humor”

The most evident stuff is the Velvet Underground box (just above the Dylan one): are you among the many that see Velvet as a very big influence? Or is just ‘a big box that stands out over other stuff’? Both. There’s really no one who’s not influenced by the Velvet Underground, whether they know it…

Isobel Blank – “The sense of partiality, meant as the difference that identify anyone, has always been a fundamental part of my qualities”

Connections among different forms of art: that’s what seems to emerge from what I see, from the DVD of Michel Gondry to the ‘physical’ mixture in placing records and books together. As far as I know one of your main interest is to cross or even destroy borders between different art forms (if art can…

Record Store Day 2019 – Concrete Shelves’ 10 + 1 Consumer Advises

The Record Store Day takes place on April the 13th this year 2019, and we at Concrete Shelves decided to create a special post for it, collecting a set of suggestions from some of the artists and friends that featured on our blog, plus some anticipation on future articles. These are far from being the…

Achim Breiling – “I felt that I know bands that other people do not, and that I could contribute to share these informations. That’s why I started to write reviews”

I know you from your interest on progressive music, but there’s a huge section of classical CDs. Do you have this kind of background? What is the Siddartha Box I see? I indeed also have quite an extensive collection of classical music, mostly ‘modern’ music, written in the 20th or 21st century, but also from…

Stefano Pifferi – “Writing about music was a sort of teenage desire I satisfied later in my life: it allowed me to discover everyday a new part of this huge mosaic scattered all around”

It looks like a ‘listening studio’: there are nothing but records, a table and a laptop in this room! I guess you take listening very seriously, and as far as I know you didn’t give up yet in writing about music (as for instance Davide Montoro recently did). What is still pushing you to do…

Mark Nelson – “When I was in college I studied literature and got more than enough theory. Now I try to be direct and emotional”

It’s not easy to see the albums, but I guess you have many Deutsche Grammophon CDs in the drawers. Do you have a classical background as a listener and/or as musician? It’s not evident in your music… Which composers you like? I listen to a lot of classical music, and most of those Deutsche Grammophon…

Nuno Moita – “I’ve started buying records when I was 13 years old and going to concerts regularly since I was 15. And it never stopped”

I know you have very wide tastes, but I see more rock, blues, jazz and pop than expected. Good! I noticed in particular Tom Waits’ “Orphans”, a really cool little box from one of my favourite artist. It’s one of the rare case, in my opinion, of a box that includes previously unrealeased material and…

Stefan Knappe – “I believe that a wide field is opened for personal growth and development, when you leave the borders of standardized music behind”

The first word that came into my mind watching at the pictures was “precarious”, or “insecure”… there’s a lot of stuff, not only records, and seems to be very close to collapse one day. But at the same time, it looks solid. Do you think it fits your attitude to music somehow? Troum are (for…

Fabio Ricci – “I think that part of life lies in the acceptance that your ego can die. If it never dies, it will simply kill everyone around you in the end”

I’m interested in some particular objects among the records, like the photo of the woman, in black and white. It somehow reminded me instantaneously the cover of vonneumann “Il de’ metallo”, then reprised in “Il de’ blues”… who are these persons? They both have a melancholic expression… Wow, I hadn’t thought of that at all,…

Gareth Dickson – “The drone of the pipes is something that’s seeped in to my music: I’m aware of it now years after beginning to form my playing style”

Nick Cave, Plastikman and Cocteau Twins: this three LPs one after the other (I suppose by chance) somehow suggest me a connection to your music. When I first discovered you, my mind brought me to some kind of ‘dark and strange’ songwriting, a new wave attitude, but also a structure of sounds that is not…

Lee Lee – “I have records, CDs and cassettes scattered all throughout my house. I think it’s probably similar to people who have photos of their kids around.”

Well, that’s pretty crazy. So the question is WHY do you keep your records scattered in the house this way? I live alone and I spend a lot of my time alone. At my age (50) I just want a simple life and I take pleasure in very simple things. Music brings me enormous joy…

Tony Buck – “I had in Australia 92 Miles Davis records that at one point I decided to listen to chronology, which took about six months, and was incredibly informative”

I know that you have not only toured and travelled a lot, but you spent your life in different continents and countries: Australia, Japan, Germany… but the records are (happily) still here! That’s not so easy, other musicians decided to get rid of them: I’ve recently contacted Blaine Reninger of Tuxedomoon that kindly…

Davide Montoro – “With the act of writing I was forgetting how beautiful is listening and enjoying music, so I stopped all, after years”

Oh God… Elio e le Storie Tese complete collection. I think it’s the one you could get in the newsstand distribution, right? That’s a band I never appreciated, even thou I know many friends of mine that, like you (it seems) love them. What does a fan of Ulver finds interesting into them? I loved…

Robin Storey/Rapoon – “I used to listen to films through the hi-fi and not watch the TV. I didn’t have one!”

So, here is the way this interview started… Hi Matteo,I have a feeling you might be disappointed.I actually have very few CD’s and Vinyls. My collection(s) got stolen twice, and i don’t listen to much other things… a couple of these have never even been played, whereas others are old friends.I have a ton of…

Sea Wanton – “In 1980 we paid a visit to a Throbbing Gristle concert. This kind of provocation seemed to be strong enough to fight against every attempt of submission”

Eric Clapton “Unplugged” and Nitzer Ebb “That Total Age” are two of my favourite albums ever. The only thing I may find in common is some sort of minimalism in the music, very ‘bare’ somehow. By the way, I’m always extremely happy when I find such eclectic sets of records… I suppose your tastes are…

Paola De Angelis – “Not only am I not scared, on the contrary I am definitely attracted by tragic figures!”

Well, I noticed two guys first: Jeff Buckley and Kurt Kobain [if I’m not wrong]. Two happy ones! Along with your beloved Nick Drake and some others in the shelves (the great Jackson C. Frank above any other), I may euphemistically say that you’re not scared by musicians whose lives are interwoven with…

TJ Norris – “Because of this collected chaos I am prone not to buy much music in physical form until I can see the spines in real time”

Oh God! You use robust plastic boxes to keep your CD… how can you reach the ones in the back? Are them packed this way so you can move the whole thing when needed? Laugh out loud. This is an unfortunate state of transition, I know how it looks from the outside, but being an…

Andrea Aguzzi – “I think my father was a compulsive collector. I don’t know, maybe it was a post-war reaction: a sort of ‘accumulate and conserve’ thing”

Well yes. I adore guitars and Zappa, Page, Bream, Williams, Hendrix… are the godfathers! But you know… guitar doesn’t mean only a virtuoso player. There are a lot of guitar players who think in a different way than the usual “guitar hero” way of life. Karoli is one of these. You know… almost twenty years…

Patrick Leagas – “Digging a hole until I was almost out of sight was one such weird pastime I used to break my malady, digging to exhaustion and beyond, one of Gurdjeff’s techniques”

It’s funny to guess the mess that might surround these objects, I’m fascinated by the trumpet that lies on top of the CDs, the flugelhorns around and the skull (maybe a knife? such as the ones that Lemmy of Motorhead collects?) Could you tell me about these objects? I also wonder about the frame on…

Simon Balestrazzi – “When it comes to experimental, obscure and unconventional music, Italian musicians were and still are among the most interesting in the world”

Well, you told me that you ran out of space for records and… they look really packed, I must admit. How are they organized? Or disorganized? In strict alphabetical order. But with a few twists… being a potentially compulsive record buyer I forced myself to a rule: no record can be placed in the “archive”…

Lino Brunetti – “The world of music and its fans is basically a multitude of funny nutters – me being one of them – and maybe that’s just the fun and the beauty of it!”

Oh, finally: Simon and Garfunkel! Their “Greatest Hits” is one of the few records that I’m heavily listening since I was a boy! I love them, but few of my ‘musical friend’s are fans… As far as I can see, you are one of them, right? Actually, I can’t really say that I am a…

Taylor Deupree – “I feel very strongly that music releases should have a physical counterpart. There is simply no soul in a download”

The very first thing that I noticed was Ian Curtis half-face emerging among the other CDs. It’s the box “Heart and Soul”. That band is the turning point in musical listening for so many people (including me), especially for those that somehow developed a sort of ‘melancholic taste’. So Joy Division meant a lot to…

Maurizio Pustianaz – “I like to be free to listen to the music whenever and where I want to, so I rip the records I’m purchasing, just like I was doing in the 80s, when I was taping them”

I see that you somehow wanted to show me those series of LPs. What do you think of the vinyl revenge/retromania that obsesses a lot of people? I mean, I love the ‘full size’ of LP covers, and the warm sound of vinyl, compared to the sharp one of CD… but for some reason I…

Rutger Zuydervelt – “I guess my first ‘alternative music’ was death metal”

I see Greg Kelly (I love Nperign!) and Pauline Oliveros. Two artists that I could connect to your work as musician, as their attention to the grain of sound and to the shape of what reaches the ears of the listener is huge… as far as I listened to your records, it seems that you…

Cassette Hoarders United – “Everyone needs a friend who uses cassette tapes. I’m happy to be that friend for you”

It happens sometimes to find, by chance, a group of enthusiast people that, when they discover Concrete Shelves, they just fall in love with the idea of sharing some photo of the records they own. It just happened with the Cassette Hoarders United, a Facebook group devoted to this hissing media. Here are some of…

Empty shelves (for Summer holidays)

Concrete Shelves will be off to mountains, without shelves, for the whole August months. We’ll be back in September with new amazing stuff from the crazy bunch of Cassette Hoarders United. Then we’ll peek into the houses of Marc Urselli, Patrick Leagas, Lino Brunetti, Gernstein, Machinefabriek and many more…