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…
Tag: LP
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…
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.”
Well, that’s pretty crazy. So the question is WHY do you keep your records scattered in the house this way? I live alone and I spend a lot of my time alone. At my age (50) I just want a simple life and I take pleasure in very simple things. Music brings me enormous joy…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 