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…
Category: label owner
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…
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”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Piero Bielli (ADN) – “You may define us a heterogeneous group of frustrated listeners!”
I see a lot of cassettes, the main medium in the far times when you started with ADN: you still have all the first issues, including Merzbow and Pascal Comelade’s debuts? I tried to find them somewhere but I failed… are the ADN releases stored in some other spot? Yes, we started with the cassette…
My Dear Killer – “It seems that wherever I set, then somehow things fold up rather abruptly to the point I start thinking it’s my own responsibility”
The first question would really be: where the hell you live? These pictures seem to have been taken by a trembling hand man living in a dark little room. That actually seems to pretty fit with the image of your label, Under My Bed. Time ago, if I’m not wrong, you told me that the…
Alberto Scotti – “I love the pop culture, the colours, the excess, the mocking, the weird, but also the night, the dark culture, the minimalistic rigor, the gloomy, the awkward”
It may sound silly, but the first main thing I notice is the heavy presence of cartoon’s figures and puppets: Spongebob, Kenny of South Park and five of the Barbapapa on top of the TV, as guardians of the CDs on the back. On the other hand, there are very ‘serious’ elements around, such as…
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…
Lawrence English – “Music and cooking go hand in hand for me. I cook a very simple Spaghetti Aglio e Olio… it’s a version of the recipe shared by my friend William Basinski”
I love the wooden stool in front of the LPs. It makes me figure you sitting there for minutes in order to choose the right one for a specific moment, a sort of ecstatic or sacred approach to music listening. I think it might be connected with the nature of the music you play or…
Deison – “I’m often visiting abandoned places like derelict buildings, where you are ‘not supposed’ to go and sometimes I pick things up”
Wow, cool, I see “Heresy” from Virgin Prunes, a whole box… Well, Virgin Prunes were one of my obsessions back in the days; I own 3 copies of that fantastic record, 3 different editions, a strange format as it’s a double 10” vinyl record with booklets. Weird is also the story behind those tracks because…
Amy Denio – “I don’t listen to music spontaneously very much. In reality, I hardly ever buy music!”
I see a lot of unknown (to me) names, even some with Cyrillic fonts… How did you get that stuff? I know you’re a very multicultural and always meeting musicians, right? Almost all of my CDs were given to me by friends, or by people that I met on tour. Not visible is a pile…
Andrea Marutti – “As soon as a new record enters the house my very first concern is to add it to the list, even before opening it or listening to it”
Dear lord! At a first sight I thought that you do also have records in the toilet… you knew that our common friend Bruno Dorella keeps cassettes in the kitchen? I’m often asking to the Concrete Shelves contributors where and how they like to listen to music, especially when they listen to harsh or extreme…
Al Margolis – “You never know how many copies someone made of a tape”
Well, a first one very spontaneous question: I see a lot of LPs in what seems to be a basement, or a least a low ceiling room. The records are so heavily wrapped in plastic that at a first sight they don’t even look 33 rpm vinyls. My friend Gianmaria Aprile, musican and…
Vasco Viviani – “I have a dream to fall into a second-hand music shop and find all that I’ve already bought and then lost…”
As far as I can guess, these records are randomly stored in a few IKEA drawers under your TV set, right? But I’m not surprised to see that you totally mixed different genres, I know that you have very wide tastes. But I didn’t expect Luca Carboni! I love his music… and how can you…
Marufura Fufunjiru – “Music is important, but the main thing for me will always be how people treat each other”
Well, it seems that 90% of your collection is Miles Davis on one side and John Cage on the other… do you like the good balance between improvisation and composition? I thought you where more a guy of extremes… John Cage and Miles Davis, as you can see, are two of my great heroes…
Onga – “You think it’s difficult to get a CD from that tall tower? I tried to reach it and I almost killed myself”
A shoe rack packed with what I guess are hand-made black boxes full of CD sets, with a one meter tall temple of other CDs, all made nearly unreachable by fifth cardboard heavy boxes replete with LPs. In the miserable day when you feel like listening one of the CDs on the upper left corner…
Gianmaria Aprile – “I don’t like holding LPs closed in a plastic envelope, ‘cause I like too much listening to them.”
Well, I knew you have a lot of vinyls, but what I notice in the pictures is that many of them are like ‘consumed’, are they mostly old? How did you get them? I was very lucky ‘cause I inherited a rich vinyls collection from my uncle… and of course, today, I keep buying others…
Yan Jun – “Minimalism in art smells very bourgeois nowadays”
Amazing! You’ve got a lot of stuff… is it as messy as it seems or there is some order (I see many Erstwhile CD piled together at least)? Yes there is order. I really hate if I want to find something but it’s lost in to a messy pit. The last summer my wife complained…
Concrete Shelves 