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…
Category: journalist
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…
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…
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…
Enrico Bettinello – “I try to do my best, but sometimes it happens to me to buy something again or be surprised to have a record I did not remember of…”
I’ll inscribe you in the ‘tidy ones’. It seems that you’re one of those who can locate an album in a glimpse, right? And, as expected knowing you as a journalist, I found many jazz albums, with a special relevance to “Bitches Brew” on top. Is it there by chance, or is “The Album” for…
Dmitry Vasiliev – “My mother told me that when I was less than two years old, my favourite toy was the old radio, a big box with loudspeakers inside, table size”
The pictures you took are very very dark, and in one of them I see what I guess are the (still sealed) releases of Monochrome Vision. I know you since a long time now, and I’m always impressed by the immense culture you have about anything VERY experimental in music, VERY dark, harsh, somehow difficult…
Emiliano Grigis – “Having less and less time I prefer to use my visual memory and a physical connection to music”
I notice on the down left corner “The Idiot” of Iggy Pop… I can’t avoid asking you: are you going to drink whiskey, watch “Stroszek”, listen to that album and hang yourself? Jokes apart, I see also one entrac’t CD with his awesome minimal packaging and the historical Verbatim box for CD-Rs. Are you still…
Joseph Sannicandro – “I always love seeing how other people think to organize their books and records, it is a kind of microcosm of how someone’s mind works”
The most visible and exposed records are “Montreal Taperun” and “Out of Standards” by the mythical ADN Italian records. You’re partially Canadian/American and Italian music lover, artist and journalist. Are you among those who think that Italian experimental music is so worldwide fundamental? Yes, well I grew up in Westchester, NY not far from the…
Stefano Isidoro Bianchi – “It’s rare, I must admit, that I play a record just to listen to it”
Hi Matteo. I’ll be happy to take some photos of my records for you, but now I have to send out the January issue of Blow Up magazine and the packages are actually covering me the view of the LPs… No problem, send that stuff anyway, it would be great to see the shelves before and…
Frans De Waard – “Many times I have been asked if I really had a big collection of records, following all these reviews I wrote. Well, no.”
[This post needs a short introduction – I’ve contacted Frans via Facebook on December 2018, with the following message, which actually is the usual one I send to those I invite to contribute to Concrete Shelves. What follows is (nearly) the uncut the conversation that we had.] Hi Frans! We’ve been in touch many times…
PAYNOMINDTOUS – “We basically don’t have any money to spend on records, so almost like 75% of what you see has been left at our place by friends”
I love your corner of records. It looks like a tiny messy temple of precious things. In the very centre, there is that Godflesh box that I’m finding on many shelves here (also because it’s heavily visible, as much as Godflesh music is heavily strong). You’re a couple of very young organizers of experimental…
Vittore Baroni – “I do not listen to a lot of Swaili folk tunes…”
Well, your collection is amazing, especially the LPs… so you even need a ladder to reach soem of them. How can you remember where a specific record is stored? In which order are they put? They are arranged alphabetically and for genres, Italian stuff has a separate section as well as jazz and classical music….
Why Concrete Shelves?
I’ve always been extremely curious about other people’s books and records. Mostly records. Each time I enter a new house, I often identify the spot where CDs, LPs or cassettes are stored, I forget the other people in the room and I keep staring at the shelves (or sometimes just stacks) of sometimes unknown names,…
Concrete Shelves 