In my Room..

Coming back to my love all I found is a rape scene which I’m sure I’m responsible for. Watching her from the bed I don’t even recognise her skin because the paleness reflects through my drugs as a memory of colors that are now stored deep inside brown boxes collected from a body-builders shop down the road a couple of weeks ago. Reebok boxes. Constant is the noise that the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion New Single She Said makes by staring at me from the front of my fridge – what holds it up is a mixture of different types of blue-tack kind of adhesives collected from other posters that died of internal combustion in ancient times which I’m glad not to recall anymore. And OK. Here you go. Reebok Boxes. Now I’ll stop it ‘cause it start to sound too pretty fuckin’ dull to me as well but I’m talking about something that I’ve been sharing my the last five years of my life with, which in perspective is one sixth of my life for Satan sake! Reebok Boxes. Something that should have died three days ago is screaming out of the new boiler which I only managed to abuse for the last three weeks. I wish I could explain it in better words but this five years in here has been a great crying laugh of people swinging on a swing and three nights on a row with a drug of a girl in a room and a cat from the far east asking me the best way to die. There was also a birthday party where the walls started to throw out adrenaline to human beings and God sent Cupid to strike every single moving thing in the room but I refused out of cynicism or because I knew the one I love by myself anyway but she was already far far far far far far far away.  7 far are more than enough to me. Then I remember the crazy fights with my neighbour that couldn’t cope with the fact that I’m a crazy noisy punk-rock guitar-DRUMS player. I’ll miss u/I’m NOT GONNA MISS U. What I’m gonna miss and I don’t even know why is the rain coming through my rough but yeah..I’m gonna miss that. And the cold. So cold that I had to wear fingerless glows to play guitar. I’m gonna miss that too. But above all I’m gonna miss u. My love. My room. Before me your walls give space to an amazing filmmaker. Before that someone even changed sex in your presence. And before that people used to make clothes for the Nothing Hill Carnival. So yeah. This is my little elegy to you. My room. And I’m sorry if I exploded myself on your walls. In your air. In your hears. Now it’s all to you. You Room.

Alway Coca Cola -Brutal Version-

On the eve of opening of the final degree show of my Sound Arts course, I was asked to do a performance. I decided -actually on the same day- to do something related to my CANCAN installation. I was gonna do a guitar improv anyway, but I though about improvising around the 'Always Coca Cola' theme. I had both a guitar amp and a bass amp at my disposal, and MANY distortion pedals in between. Here's a video and some pics of the event. The video is a small fraction as the piece was 20 minutes long. Brutal as my friends said..my friend Sarah even left a note for me: 'You raped my ears'..signing off..

CANCAN and the death of the Butt Kickers

So here we go. The installation happened, and I enjoyed the opening really much. All the works of my classmates was really interesting and the audience seemed to be engaged and to interact with the installations - when this was wanted by the artists. Unfortunately I pushed the tactile transducer a bit too much and..well..KABOOM..taking down the piece as of this moment because the rain got through the container and I don't want to die electrocuted in a metal container only a week after the end of my degree..here some pics of the thing for posterity. special thanks to Philip Holmes for making the main structure and to Acme Bars -Indo Pub- for sponsoring part of it.It seemed that the crowd enjoyed the piece in spite of all the technical problems. The composition track had different responses, with some people really getting into it and other despising it for his socio-political contents - while working on a mixer and various cable connections I overheard some students calling the piece 'pretentious' and saying that my business cards are really good for making 'roaches'- which it is probably true, but I stopped smoking pot a long time ago (why?)..mm..anyway enjoy the pics..signing off..

Leslie Shatz and the scattering of my undead brainsssshhhh...

Leslie in studio..maybe recording pool table' sounds??!

In a moment of boredom at my parent’s house back in Italy I turned on the TV and started zapping through the tragedy of the Sky channels. Suddenly everything stopped and I snapped out of the room and found myself underneath a shower of broken glasses cutting through my brains. This is kind of what I felt the first time I watched the shower scene from Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park. Without taking away any credits from Van Sant’s amazing visuals, what makes this scene so special to me is the sound design and the resulting perfect synesthetic marriage between the image and the sound.  Searching through the imdb database I soon found out that the man behind this sonic magic is a regular Van Sant’s collaborator called Leslie Shatz. One of his first jobs was as dialogue editor for ‘Apocalypse Now’ and the year after for ‘Star Wars: the empire strikes back’. Since then it seems like he worked in loads of productions that I really enjoyed. As sound designer for The assassination of Jesse James, Gomorrah, The Road, Elephant, Dracula, and only as sound re-recordist for others, which are definitely not in my top 10 best films ever (Rambo 4, Van Helsing, Hidalgo). Finally I’m watching Paranoid Park from beginning to end for the first time. Because last time I started watching more than half way through, many things now start to make sense, but hey! If you didn’t watch it yet try to do it from the shower scene and then rewind to the beginning the second time around. So here’s a video of the scene. Enjoy. Ps Crank up the volume pleeease!!! Signing off..

The Red Coca Cola Cans Only Bins Legacy..

As I pretty much reached the amount of red coke cans that I needed for the ‘CANCAN’ installation, I think it is now time to draw conclusion on how the three red bins that I installed around London worked out in the end.

RED BIN 1 – installed at HFC Halal Fried Chicken Shop, Whitechapel: didn’t go well at all. Loads of chicken bones and residues of half eaten burgers and few cans, and the owner threw the bin in the street after a week (luckily I managed to recover it).

RED BIN 2 – installed at  PFC2 Perfect Fried Chicken Shop, Whitechapel: this was excellent!!! For some reasons the owner convinced the customers to use it only for cans – not only red of course, but this is the place from which I collected most of them. It worked so well that the owner decided to start recycling, and as a gift I left him the bin. Thanks Abdul. You’re a good man.

RED BIN 3 – LCC Canteen, Elephant and Castle. This was actually the worst. Even with the red signs all around the college student just couldn’t get it – or they couldn’t give a damn about it, or simply they can’t read, they’re just pretending.

I was gonna take it away, but Simon –the manager- asked me to keep it there, as he’s also into recycling and he exclaimed: they MUST learn to use it!

So this is the results, and the unexpected legacy that this bin created.

I’m a pessimist, and I don’t think recycling will save the world, but it doesn’t take much effort to throw something in the left hand side bin instead that in the right hand side one.

A big thanks to all the people and friends that collected empty cans for me, especially Drew and Giovanna. Great score. Some more cans might come from outside London, but not sure if they’ll make it on time. Signing off..

CANCAN in Tasmania!!!

It’s been a while since the last post, but catastrophe struck!!! Two of the main technical things I needed for my sound installations got blocked by custom in..Tasmania! It took a while to get through all the papers (and the damn fine) but now they arrived. The two thingies in question is a pair of Aura Pro tactile transducers - also known as ‘butt-kickers’ or ‘bass shakers’(I put a pack of cigarette next to them so you got an idea of the dimensions).

They’re fundamental for my project as from my research seems like the perfect one to shake the mountain of red coke cans. Oh yeah! I changed the name of the project from “You CAN walk (in your corporate grave)” to “CANCAN” for two reasons: first I like the new one more anyway, and second because for health and safety reasons you CAN’T actually walk (on my deathly sound-installation-grave).

I’m in contact with a carpenter, and next week we’ll try the Transducers on different kinds of wood – and maybe metal as well. The transducer will be excited by infrasounds coming from an amplifier. These infrasounds will be part of my final composition for the piece, which is a cut-up of different coca-cola adverts and some speeches from various U.S. presidents. The sound of the coke cans rattle should be then amplified using some contact mics(the red/black snake-looking things you see in the picture). here is where it gets tricky, as I’m not aware as yet of the sound resulting. I’ll try to manipulate it using some guitar pedals fx. But that’s all for now. Time is running faster than a tsunami wave but I’ll keep surfing on my see of coke cans. Signing off..

The Red CokeCan Chicken Massacre

So..a terrible toothache had the best out of me for the last two weeks, but finally I'm my brain is back into function. Two of the red bins are installed. They're in two of the chicken shops around the East London Mosque in Whitechapel. As I work in the pub next door I though it was a good idea keep the locations as local as possible - if the bin is full I can just pop by to the shops and collect/put a new bin bag. Today's the first day. Cross fingers and I really hope not to find too many chicken bones covered in mayonnaise in the bins..signing off..