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,…
Tag: home
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…
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…
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”
Cool! “Storia della filosofia indiana” [“History of Indian Philosophy”] and “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex” are the first two books that I see! Sign of a twisted personality? Funny that one is in Italian and the other one in German. I know you live in Berlin since a lot of time… I suppose you like the…
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…
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!”
Even a video? Cool, thanks. You know I’ve never heard of this band/duo? This tiny excerpt playing from your turntable sounds in fact very attracting… I’ll check it out. It surprise me that you have a favourite of all the times! Not everybody has one. Could you tell me more? Firstly: the duo Deux Filles…
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…
Thorsten Lütz – “The finanical was only an irrelevant fact. The main thing was that running a record label was and still is fun”
I see a lot of Karaoke Kalk in these images, in these LP covers you wanted to show me: irony, arty things, kitsch, pop culture and experimentation at the same time, a little bit of darkness and pure enjoyment. Do you agree that these terms relate to this LP covers and their music and…
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…
Concrete Shelves 