mixmag netherlands
In conversation with the author of “Un pubblico meraviglioso [A wanderful audience] Andrea Lai
A common thread connects turntables set up like antennas, community centers as laboratories of the future, and the whispered phrase “A Wonderful Audience” at the end of the set. That thread took shape in Agatha between 1998 and 2006 at the Brancaleone in Rome. Andrea Lai and the late Riccardo Petitti, two “soundonauts,” fused avant-garde sound with street culture. Now Lai’s book brings that forgotten legacy back to life. In today’s homogenized nightlife, revisiting that era is an act of cultural resistance. I spoke with Andrea to see what remains of that wonder....
“Third places”, current but already relevant thirty years ago: where did need for Agatha, innovative format far from clubs, originate?
There are two birth moments for Agatha. The first is practical, almost accidental. Agatha is born out of Radio Città Futura, a left wing radio station in the Radio Popolare Italian network, that in those years looked a lot like a London pirate radio with little money and a lot of passion. Throwing a night at a club seemed the most direct way to bring that sound into the city in physical form and scrape together something to pay the bills.
The second birth is an awakening, an artistic determination. We wanted to research rhythms and sounds, hunt for the future and sub frequencies, and to do that we needed a space that wasn’t just a container but part of the meaning of the night. Not a commercial club, not a militant social centre in the twentieth- century sense of the word, something in between. A place where sound could be the main political and cultural act of the night. We had no theory, we just needed a space that didn’t ask us to choose between rigour and pleasure, between culture and dancing, between commitment and lightness. Agatha is born out of that impossibility of choice.
Riccardo Petitti came from years of official clubs he had grown tired of. I felt that the sounds that had taken me (jungle, acid jazz, trip hop, leftfield) had nothing to do with anything that existed until then. The English raves had just been outlawed by the British government, the European ones were at their
sunset, reduced
to drug dens playing music for white people. The official clubs felt like an old model that needed to be grafted with street culture and with bass that demanded
systems built specifically for it.
The magazines and pirate radios were talking about a new culture, a different kind of club. When Agatha arrived at Centro Sociale Brancaleone everything aligned with the sound, the people, the records, Rome. The new sounds of the night, amplified by the Branca’s system and its posture different from the other social centres, open to experimenting with new forms of celebration, triggered a chemical reaction that was about to infect everything.
058
AUTHOR ALESSANDRA SOLA PHOTOGRAPHY FEDERICO TALAMANCA
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82
