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…
Category: performer
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…
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…
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…
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…
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”…
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…
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?…
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…
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…
Marino Malagnino – “Doing noise music does not mean to do be idiots”
Well, among these foggy and dark photos, that make me figure that you live in a messy but inspiring and creative cave, I noticed “Vangelo secondo Matteo”. Is it really a religious CD? Why do you have it? I remember that you told me time ago that some of the musicians that you involved in…
