Concrete Shelves

The Gävle City Library: a heaven for music addicted

Well, it’s me speaking, the guy that usually asks annoying questions to music addicted, trying to explore their tastes and ways of living through the records they own. As said many times, this comes from my natural (or perverted) curiosity that forces me to drive my glimpse to any shelve full of records I might…

Marc Urselli – “I used to tell the guy ‘I like this and this, what do you have that sounds similar?’ The good old day of human record store clerk recommendations!”

A tribe of turtles dominates over the wooden shelves full of the dubbed cassettes. A telephone cable adaptor underneath it all, the kind of object that tells me that technology has got a hard road to get into this house. An impressive image, at least to my eyes. Can you comment on that, please? Well that’s…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Federico Tixi – “Do you remember when only a few people had a CD burner and we used to pay actual money to have a CD copied?”

First of all, congratulations for the good shots! These are well done pictures of an impressive collection of records, kept tidy and mixed with interesting books, posters and mirabilia… But the thing that I’d like to hold on my hands is the Disciplinatha strange packaging on the top left of the CD shelve. They’re a…

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…

Milena Montalbano – “I manage to get set-lists from the stage. Just linger around until the stage is empty and snatch it”

What emerges for me immediately is the suffering face of Ian Curtis. I knew of course that you’re one of the millions of huge Joy Division fans, but you are (like me) also appreciating the ‘new new wave’ bands, what someone calls imitators of them… Interpol, Editors, XX, now Cigarettes after Sex – that I’ve…

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…

Graham Crowley – “I can’t listen to music when I’m in the studio painting. Any response to the music would modify my judgement and behaviour”

Well, is pretty clear that among the vast collection you have, Captain Beefheart is the boss. You told me that you’ve recently also been invited to speak about the paintings of him as Don Van Vliet at The Captain Beefheart Symposium at The Bluecoat Gallery… what was your speech about, and why do…

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…

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…

Angèle David-Guillou – “Spending long evening drinking wine and listening to music is part of what friendship and life in general are about, for me”

It seems you like African Music: I’ve discovered it late in my musical life, but I think that sometimes we ‘western’ get to it when we’re fed up with 4/4 rhythms and generally ‘squared’ structures. Is it the same for you or you had the opportunity to grow up with non-western music already when…

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…

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…

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…

Bruno Dorella – “Harsh noise music really cleans my brain, it resets it actually, it makes my thoughts very clear, so I’m gonna cook something delicious”

“I sent you the photos of LPs and CDs, as I’ve put the cassettes in the cellar. I pick a few of them every now and then, and I put them in a wall holder in the kitchen, which is where I like to listen to them. Please note that, about the vinyls, this is…

Paolo Bandera – “Whatever sound I am listening to, I really like it LOUD”

It’s absolutely impressive, but it does not surprise me, I knew that you’re a heavy collector. And, as expected, I see a lot of what I can call ‘heavy’ stuff, things like Swans, Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, Boris, New Blockaders… you with Sigillum S and maybe even more with SSHE RETINA STIMULANS are known for having…

Rinus Van Alebeek – “The tape is the only time-travelling device that was ever made”

You actually sent me blurred pictures, as you told me you had some trouble with the iPad and the laptop, and I see an orthogonally disposed set of tapes, along with fascinating walkmen! There’s maybe a connection. In this era of hyper-compressed beats and HD sounds, you’re surely not the only one who loves the…

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…

John Guilor – “I honestly think the original Doctor Who theme is the best piece of music ever committed to tape”

I love doing this stuff, I have the impression of getting much more ‘close friend’ to the one I involve. Each time I get the pictures, I discover something I expected (The Beatles) and I didn’t (Les Claypool). So you’re a huge fan of the Fab Four, like sooooo many others in the world. I…

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…

Paul Lemos – “Like some hoarder, I am a slave to this CD collection”

“Here is a pic of the sun pourch: a total horrific mess! Like some hoarder, I am a slave to this CD collection… after my last move, years ago, everything was left unorganized…and it never changed. So, I will get rid of about 75% of what you see in that picture. I just will put…

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….

A beginning.

Concrete Shelves will start publishing on Monday the 4th of December. First peeks on records will be into Vittore Baroni tower of LPs and Paul Lemos CD dump in the sun porch. But over the following months we’ll peek into the shelves of other musicians, label owners, actors, painters, visual artists, record shop owners or…

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,…