“I sent you the photos of LPs and CDs, as I’ve put the cassettes in the cellar. I pick a few of them every now and then, and I put them in a wall holder in the kitchen, which is where I like to listen to them. Please note that, about the vinyls, this is the complete collection, but many CDs are still in various boxes scattered around Europe.”
So you said that you have records ‘abandoned’ all over Europe, after your house movings. How do you feel about those abandoned sons and daughters you left behind? You think some day you’ll recover them? How did you choose which one to left behind?
I moved many times, Milan, Berlin, little villages in the middle of nowhere… I have records waiting for me in different places. I’m not very attached to things, and there’s a lot of music out there, I know I will get those records back somehow at some point, it will be good to rediscover them. It already happened with a lot of records, recently I found “Uptown Avondale” by the Afghan Whigs in a closet at my parents’ place, one of the best cover EP ever released, it was fantastic to listen to it again.
Nice to see the tapes you keep in the kitchen! And I see typical TDK/Sony tapes. So you still do listen to duplicated cassettes, with such a huge collection of LPs and CDs?
Of course! And some of them are among my favourite music sessions! I adore listening to music while I cook, and the lo-fi feeling of a ghettoblaster gives a totally different energy to those albums. Some genres MUST be listened to on tape. Crust, gabber, harsh noise… they have a totally different flavour on tape! Like sitting in a squat kitchen waiting for the tofu chilli. Talking about flavours, I’m going to the kitchen, I’ll cook listening to Sshe Retina Stimulants this evening.
What the fuck! Sshe Retina Stimulants as the perfect soundtrack for cooking sounds pretty weird! What will you cook with such perverted sounds (with all the respect I have for Paolo Bandera’s stuff, which is absolutely great!)? It seems that you and your partner in OvO, Stefania Pedretti, see a strong connection between music and cooking… I remember her nice project of cooking on stage and providing sounds from contact microphones connected to knives and so… I’d say it’s very Italian, like it was very British when Virgin Prunes took tea on stage!
It is definitely very italian. We are obsessed by food, we take time for it, so it’s normal to listen to music while we do it… Harsh noise music really cleans my brain, it resets it actually, it makes my thoughts very clear, so I’m gonna cook something delicious. And I am sure it’s the same with Stefania (yes, her ?Alos performance was the top of the music and food connection!).
Do you even sing sometimes when you cook? I heard that in your first recent solo record “Jack Cannon” you sing on some track, but time ago you told me that you don’t feel comfortable in singing.
Of course I sing when I cook! Some days ago I sang along to Iron Maiden’s “Aces High”, my falsetto was way better than Bruce Dickinson’s!
Concrete Shelves 