mixmag netherlands
Your book arrives at a historical moment of great turmoil for Italy, for social centres, and for gathe- ring spaces in general…
There are people behind mo- vements and spaces – people who think, talk to each other, meet, and act. If recent genera- tions lose the desire for human progress, for a social future, for cultural advancement, I think it’s hard to imagine an alterna- tive. Believing in the future has never been easy; the future has been uncertain for generations. Changing things has to do with the urgent and inevitable search for the never-before-seen. The never-before-seen lives in the future; it’s the place where there is something no one has thought of yet, some sound no one has ever created. Media and the cul- ture peddled by social networks do nothing but promote the past: ‘everything was better before.’ But the past is a trap; it’s the opposite of action. Moving bac- kwards, returning to a reassuring or idealised past, is the opposite of progressive culture; the return to the local cultures, so trendy these days, is the opposite of su- pranational culture; the local, the particular, are the opposite of the universal. We are one, mankind. Dressing in 90s brands is the opposite of searching for new co- des to identify with. Wearing your parents’ clothes is the refusal to surpass them, to go beyond their legacy. It seems to me that the message – also reinforced by the simultaneous, eternal presence of all music ever existed online, always available – is promoting an eternal present where peo- ple only have to consume, which eliminates generational dyna- mics that might want to change things.
8.In the ’90s, Agatha injected avant-garde into the system with popular
resonance. Now
politics co-opts fashion. What changed? Why today’s shadows and grey areas?
Dance music is functional mu- sic; it’s music to dance to, and dancing isn’t always fashiona- ble. Dancing hasn’t always been the way youth energies express themselves. For years it was rock, other years punk, or soul, rap, funk, or disco. No music is always present in culture; there are cy- cles. In some periods, dance has been the fascination of genera- tions, their affirmation; in other periods, it’s remained hidden in the underground. When a sound disappears from the media, from the market, and from public opi- nion, it often regenerates and prepares for a new cycle. Perhaps club culture, after being depleted, weeded out, and exploited, needs rest – to return to the darkness and feed on something else, to gather new instances and find a new generation that sees dance as its own energy, that ‘dance and defend’ made of new forms and new ideas. The fact that to- day bars, butcher shops, and pia- zzas mimic clubbing tells us that clubbing must change. Those forms of appropriation that the mainstream imposes on dance music scream the exhaustion of a culture that must redisco- ver ideas, ethics, aesthetics, and above all must find dance music not trapped in clichés and trends, but made of personal ideas that find meaning among others, oriented only by urgency and ex- pressive need. Drum and bass, 2-step UK garage, broken beat, dubstep, breakbeats, and many other small ways of writing dance music were born on the threshold between two millennia, at a mo-
ment when music production be- came mass, easy for professio- nals who until then had struggled enormously to create sounds and grooves. Technology expan- ded the expressive possibilities, visions of rhythms and sounds never heard before but deeply awaited. Sounds that screamed future for a generation hungry for the future. Perhaps simply, for many people now, there’s no need to dance.
Organising an event like Agatha in Italy today feels impossible. What advice for a young Andrea and Riccardo of 2026?
I would tell them to start by liste- ning. First and foremost, to their own desire – unique and different from others – in order to find their own sound, their own style, their own recognisable way of being on the console. Not to build an ego, but to have something pre- cise to bring to others, something that contributes to the building of the present, to generational expression.
And then I’d tell them to lis- ten again,
this time outward
– towards the world around them, the feelings in the air, and towards people very
different
from them. DJs are antennas that receive and transmit, giving meaning to the nights and days of those who listen to them. They play records made by other peo- ple to compose their own sound. They organise different instan- ces, putting them in order. To do that, they need to be bidirectio- nal. They need to know how to receive before transmitting. Per- haps our time only promotes lis- tening to ourselves, not listening to ourselves among others.
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