(in alphabetical order, by name)

• A beginning.
• 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”
• 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”
• Al Margolis – “You never know how many copies someone made of a tape”
• 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”
• Alessandro Ciccarelli – “The physical experience is a fundamental component for me, in an organicistic, fluid conception”
• 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”
• Amy Denio – “I don’t listen to music spontaneously very much. In reality, I hardly ever buy music!”
• Andrea Aguzzi – “I think my father was a compulsive collector. I don’t know, maybe it was a post-war reaction: a sort of ‘accumulate and conserve’ thing”
• 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”
• 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”
• 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”
• 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”
• Cassette Hoarders United – “Everyone needs a friend who uses cassette tapes. I’m happy to be that friend for you”
• Chris Forsyth – “I’m pretty deadly sincere, musically, but I have a lot of mixed emotions and a very sarcastic sense of humor”
• 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”
• 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!”
• Concrete Shelves is on hiatus
• 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.”
• 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”
• Davide Montoro – “With the act of writing I was forgetting how beautiful is listening and enjoying music, so I stopped all, after years”
• Deison – “I’m often visiting abandoned places like derelict buildings, where you are ‘not supposed’ to go and sometimes I pick things up”
• 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”
• 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”
• Elena Botts – “I thought it would be a shame to listen to so much music and never make any”
• Emiliano Grigis – “Having less and less time I prefer to use my visual memory and a physical connection to music”
• Empty shelves (for Summer holidays)
• 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…”
• 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…”
• 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”
• 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”
• 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”
• 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?”
• 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.”
• FS Blumm – “It’s hard to concentrate on the cooking while listening to Geeta Dutt”
• Gareth Davis – “I have a huge appetite. Doesn’t matter if it is music, cinema, books, design, dance, food or anything else”
• 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”
• Gianmaria Aprile – “I don’t like holding LPs closed in a plastic envelope, ‘cause I like too much listening to them.”
• 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”
• Greg Kelley – “I tend to like things that are in between the cracks and haven’t yet been codified”
• Isobel Blank – “The sense of partiality, meant as the difference that identify anyone, has always been a fundamental part of my qualities”
• John Black (Cypher audio) – “Fewer sounds well placed: it’s how I approach sound design in general”
• John Guilor – “I honestly think the original Doctor Who theme is the best piece of music ever committed to tape”
• 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”
• 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”
• 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.”
• Lino Brunetti – “The world of music and its fans is basically a multitude of funny nutters – me being one of them – and maybe that’s just the fun and the beauty of it!”
• 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”
• Manuela Benetton – “After 15 years in Berlin, I am more interested in a place that it is human, has energy, where people have interesting and intelligent things to share”
• Mára / Faith Coloccia – “I am very interested in “the body”. The human body, or the bodies of plants, lichens, slime molds, how bodies interact”
• 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!”
• Marino Malagnino – “Doing noise music does not mean to do be idiots”
• Mark Nelson – “When I was in college I studied literature and got more than enough theory. Now I try to be direct and emotional”
• Marufura Fufunjiru – “Music is important, but the main thing for me will always be how people treat each other”
• Matteo Fiorini – “I’m thinking about organizining performances in total darkness, but first I need to learn how to play without seeing a thing!”
• 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”
• 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”
• Milena Montalbano – “I manage to get set-lists from the stage. Just linger around until the stage is empty and snatch it”
• 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”
• 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”
• Norman Westberg – “I don’t think that my tastes have changed that much in my life, only expanded somewhat”
• 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”
• Onga – “You think it’s difficult to get a CD from that tall tower? I tried to reach it and I almost killed myself”
• Paola De Angelis – “Not only am I not scared, on the contrary I am definitely attracted by tragic figures!”
• Paolo Bandera – “Whatever sound I am listening to, I really like it LOUD”
• Paolo Bertoni – “It seems to me very wise to be afraid of happiness, in fact romantic soul prevails over every other aspect, obscure and catastrophic too, of myself”
• 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”
• Patrick McGinley – “I like to hear spring sounds in winter. I like accidental melodies…”
• Paul Lemos – “Like some hoarder, I am a slave to this CD collection”
• 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”
• 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.”
• Piero Bielli (ADN) – “You may define us a heterogeneous group of frustrated listeners!”
• Record Store Day 2019 – Concrete Shelves’ 10 + 1 Consumer Advises
• 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”
• Rinus Van Alebeek – “The tape is the only time-travelling device that was ever made”
• 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”
• Robin Storey/Rapoon – “I used to listen to films through the hi-fi and not watch the TV. I didn’t have one!”
• Rutger Zuydervelt – “I guess my first ‘alternative music’ was death metal”
• Sandro Perri – “Some of my recordings are like a mosaic of the history of the song”
• 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”
• Simon Balestrazzi – “When it comes to experimental, obscure and unconventional music, Italian musicians were and still are among the most interesting in the world”
• Stefan Knappe – “I believe that a wide field is opened for personal growth and development, when you leave the borders of standardized music behind”
• Stefano Isidoro Bianchi – “It’s rare, I must admit, that I play a record just to listen to it”
• Stefano Pifferi – “Writing about music was a sort of teenage desire I satisfied later in my life: it allowed me to discover everyday a new part of this huge mosaic scattered all around”
• Taylor Deupree – “I feel very strongly that music releases should have a physical counterpart. There is simply no soul in a download”
• The Gävle City Library: a heaven for music addicted
• Thorsten Lütz – “The finanical was only an irrelevant fact. The main thing was that running a record label was and still is fun”
• 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”
• 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”
• 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…”
• Vittore Baroni – “I do not listen to a lot of Swaili folk tunes…”
• Why Concrete Shelves?
• Yan Jun – “Minimalism in art smells very bourgeois nowadays”
• Yann Novak – “I am encouraging the audience to misinterpret me in exchange for their own deeper, more personal relationship to the work”

Gallery excerpt

Here are a few examples of the pictures you’ll find here in Concrete Shelves…

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