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,…
Category: musician
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
Alexander Hacke and Danielle De Picciotto “When we became nomads and got rid of a lot of stuff, our CDs were the first thing to go”
The pictures you sent me are really unique! I know about your decision of living as gipsies now, without a stable house. I somehow then expected to see maybe CDs, but here are only LPs! They’re not known for being handy… and vinyls are so heavy! And the status of most records suggests to me…
John Black (Cypher audio) – “Fewer sounds well placed: it’s how I approach sound design in general”
Everything looks extremely tidy, bot in your studio, and even more in your house. Your production of “Creative sound for moving image” is huge, so this makes me think to an old adage that more or less says that you need order to build things, to move forward… Do you think so? I think I…
Matteo Fiorini – “I’m thinking about organizining performances in total darkness, but first I need to learn how to play without seeing a thing!”
What’s that book “How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life”? Are you influenced by Appalachian music, or blues in general? Listening to your tracks, I can say yes… what do you find in common in the spirit of black people of those places and you, now? “How bluegrass music destroyed my life” it’s the first book…
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…
Robin Rimbaud / Scanner – “I also collected a host of reel-to-reel players, video editors and projectors. Don’t worry I don’t invite friends round to show them my holiday slides though”
Those metal stylish shelves are amazing, I think you’ll get some message after this post from people that will ask “where did you buy them?” The one with castors is somehow mysterious, as I see a sort of grey curtain behind it… and bricks on the wall on the upper left. What’s behind that?…
Patrick McGinley – “I like to hear spring sounds in winter. I like accidental melodies…”
Cool! the pictures are perfect. Maybe just please take a few close-ups so I can see some more titles (I’ve seen Mogwai, Tortoise, Modest Mouse… I didn’t expect!). Haha! You can only read the titles on the ‘pop music’ shelf, because that’s where the lamp is. I’ll try to get close-ups of some other things….
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…
Christoph Hess – “During the 80’s I was listening to a lot of noise music but the records were hard to find and too expensive for me. So I tried to cut out the grooves of a bad pop album by replacing the stylus with a sewing needle”
Is it a laboratory? A workshop? Or a house? Or both? The shape of the stuff your records are surrounded reminds me the instruments you build to play your music, piles of turntables and other weird devices! Well it is just my personal room at our rented apartment where I live with my family. It…
Enrico Coniglio – “Venice is one of the most humid places in the world! Humidity affects everything, not only the sleeves of my discs but my instruments and most dangerously my old bones…”
Pretty messy mate! Is there any order? As you may have noticed, my records are not ordered according to any criteria, neither gender nor alphabetic. I just didn’t get into it… so when I’m looking for an album I almost never find it, then I play another one that I didn’t even remember to have….
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…
Peter Hollo – “How much owning different objects feels like owning an album – does a t-shirt that comes with a download code feel like the album? A postcard? A book of lyrics or poetry? Not so much to me.”
I see the unusual compilations here! Nice… often compilations are badly considered, a sort of ‘cheap’ format for publishing records, but actually I remember how in my life some compilation has really hitten me, letting me know a bunch of new bands. What are the ones ‘special’ to you? Why do you like them?…
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…
Concrete Shelves 