andrea lai
How do ‘soundonauts’ turn crea- tive goofing off into avant-garde at social centres?
We were very serious while in the console. Fun, or at least pleasure, that somewhat erotic element
I
believe is a constitutive part of the creative act. Curating a party in all its details so that it’s uni- que and up-to-date, and playing the music we had searched for, chased, and imagined, was ne- ver separable, for us, from a dose of fun. Creative goofing off isn’t the opposite of rigour; it’s kee- ping in mind that we’re not that important. For those of us born in Rome, the city itself teaches you that, reminds you on every corner, every cobblestone, every capital, every Renaissance buil- ding. The image of the ‘soundo- naut’ appealed to me because it works on the border between the seriousness of listening and the pleasure of play. It transcends the sharp boundary between organiser, player, and dancer. At Brancaleone, at Leoncavallo, and in many other small and large places, legal and illegal, in those early years, the idea came before the economy. The erotic element I mention has to do with desire as the driving force: the desire for the sound itself. The urge to dis- cover a sound, to discover oneself dancing to it, then to let others hear it and see them respond. The dancing body is an infalli- ble gauge. We had a demanding audience precisely because they were moved by the same desire as us; they were there because they had chosen to be. This quali- ty of attention turned every night into a very difficult experiment, done together. DJs make people dance without taking themsel- ves too seriously, but with a pre- cise idea of sound and style. The ‘goofing off’ is like the valve that regulates the pressure between experimentation, and success.
the audience,
How did counter-clubbing beco- me a political act, filling a histo- rical void? And what’s your vision of Italy’s clubbing and coun- ter-clubbing today?
The idea of counter-clubbing came to me while writing an ar- ticle for il Manifesto a few mon- ths ago. I was describing a new generation of DJs and organizers
trying to imagine and spread a different way of clubbing, driven not by profit but by the desire to feel good together. The definition didn’t exist when Riccardo and I were running Agatha but the practice was already there. Po- litics is any action generated by a vision of how to be together, of how to share life. A political act is the implementation of a choice, the transformation of an idea into a practice that can produce a di- fferent form of reality. At Agatha, the political and cultural vision passed through the dancefloor, through the fair price at the door, through the meticulously curated sound respectful of the music, through bodies, through possible economies, through the refusal to turn the night into a money-ma- king machine. It was political be- cause it nurtured a community different from the one available outside, far from clubs with po- dium dancers and VIP areas, but also an alternative to free parties held up by drugs. The new gene- ration I see knows that spaces must be conquered and defen- ded, that clubbing can be an act of cultural resistance even before being a format.
In October 2001, you danced against the war at Brancaleone and Leoncavallo with Agatha. How did uncertain streaming turn that night into a public ges- ture, so repressed today?
I was stuck in New York on Sep- tember 11th. I was there for the Red Bull Music Academy, which was obviously cancelled due to the attack. During the nine days I waited for planes to fly again, Bush had already declared the War on Terror. Hearing him repeat ‘Global War on Terror’ on unified American TVs, knowing Blair was with him, made everything more and more absurd. Absurd to wake up in Manhattan with the Towers on fire, and absurd a war on te- rror that itself produces terror. As soon as I returned to Rome, with Flipper
from Leoncava-
llo, we needed to do something: a political action in the sense I mentioned earlier: a practice
that proposed a different idea of reality. We wanted the thousands of people dancing at Agatha and Leoncavallo (an occupied place in Milano) to know that there weren’t just TVs peddling a single truth, that one could think something different, and that music could communicate alternative fee- lings to war and revenge. Those were days when everyone see- med obsessed with the eye for an eye thing. Riccardo, Flipper, and I didn’t share that feeling as well as so many people in Italy and Euro- pe. So we invented a maybe nai- ve but immediate name, related to what we were doing: playing turntables. So, Turntables Against the War was born, a night held si- multaneously at the Brancaleone in Rome and Leoncavallo in Mi- lan, streamed via an, at the time, unstable ADSL connection. Thou- sands of people participated; the pioneering streaming was a way to spread a grassroots idea sha- red with many people across Italy. This kind of self-organisation is the basis of clubbing. Sometimes it seems like without venues the- re’s no dance music, but in reality, the best parties were born from below, from people organising around a desire, as often by the lack of possibilities. That night’s stream was frail; it kept glitching and restarting. But the gesture was public and widespread.
061
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
