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…
Category: visual artist
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…
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”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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?…
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…
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…
Michael Leigh – “Things have certainly got a lot worse since those halcyon days of my youth. But politics aside, the world is still a great place”
I’ll be happy to peek into your collection. You are a huge mail artist! And a collector of mail art stuff… so you’re a friend of my friend Vittore Baroni? And you got in touch also with Genesis P. Orrige or other musically related mail artists? Glad you could have a look at my blogs…
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…
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 