Jealousy Party has been interviewed by Guro Skumsnes Moe on Stunt Rock #3.
Stunt Rock #2 & #3 available from Marhaug Forlag.
#3 contains interviews, recipes and a MOE comic by Mat Pogo
Jealousy Party has been around for more than 20 years and you have an energy and desire to constantly explore, expand your sound it sounds like. like an everlasting inspiration. what is punca?
POGO Hà! This year it will be exactly 20 years since and Roberta and I started it. But we always kept the group open. I guess i can say, and especially at the beginning, it was more a physiological need than an intentional process in order to achieve something specific.
I guess it’s possible, after working a while on some musical material, that you might start developing a natural sense of progressive thinking and need. I really admire and respect who feels himself committed in the advancement of a grammar, a language, a discourse. But personally I’ve been always more concerned about finding a line between areas, methods, generations of ideas and people, approaches in cultures or sub and countercultures to which i felt i was somehow belonging – more or less consciously.
WJM In that sense JP is definitely not an “avant-garde” project, no need to say, but not even specifically an “experimental” one. As a matter of fact JP has been a project on continuity. I guess is also relevant the fact of not being a musician. At least Mat and I. We are some kind of self-taught players at this point, but i will not dare to call myself a musician.
POGO We certainly developed some kind of musical processing methods, but it’s a bit like cooking with brushes. It takes a lot more and at the end you’ll probably be disappointed. But is certainly a process that keeps some specific qualities. The quantity of time we need to achieve what we have in mind is way more than for trained musicians. This probably explains why we are still at it.
WJM On the other hand the fact of being engaged with musicians triggers some crucial contradictions. In the process and in the results. I guess most of our music gets a sparkle of life from that.
Radical improvisation is a never ending space were hopefully all possible approaches are contemplated and compatible. Even if we were avid listeners before, it’s Edoardo Ricci that brought us hand by hand in the battlefield. But i fear that way of creating music needs total dedication. I mean in perspective terms. You can’t play it part time.
POGO Of course you can, and clearly you can use approaches coming from there in many different contexts. You can control it, organize, structure it. But the musician totally dedicated to free improvised music just sounds different to my ears. To me it’s not really a tool you can add to your professional palette. It’s a whole way of approaching the world of sound.
WJM But it’s also possible that every music needs this kind of dedication in order to be true to herself. On the other hand truth is such a misleading superstition, particularly talking about expression.
POGO Roberta and I we were, and still are, curious and fascinated by many possibilities of improvised music; it could be folk, noise, dealing with electroacoustic material, or going in extremely sparse areas, almost apparently silent. There’s always a chance to be deeply surprised. But still we had many other fascinations and interests.
Constantly recording our improvisations and soon incorporating those recordings in our music, became our modus operandi. Layering all these recorded material and mixing it with acoustic, electric and electronic sounds brought us to the platy complexity we have now. With his fragile but dense juxtaposition of settings, moods and memories besides actual sounds.
WJM So even if through radical improvisation we became aware of ourselves as players and of the possibility of finding something which we could call our personal expression – or close to it – i guess we mainly approached that activity more like an exploring area than a universe in itself. We’ve been more concerned about imagining our own music constantly sampling ourselves, through a spontaneous use of playback devices that has become one of Jealousy Party’s most crucial trademarks, in a musical frame that is never 100% improvised and never 100% fixed.
POGO Roberta and I both we went through the grade zero of hardcore punk in the early eighties, which in Italy during those years had some specific musical and social peculiarities. We’ve been listening to rock and pop our whole life, afroamerican musics, old and modern classical, dance musics from all over. Old and new electronic music. Collage, bruitism, self-taught musics. We are omnivores like it’s more and more easy to be nowadays. But r&b and syncopation are our mania.
Pulsing beatless impulse grooves originated by the combination of replayed recordings and live drums is the basic recipe for Punca.
WJM One day we were recording at our beloved Cannon Jack Studio in Nipozzano, on the hills in the countryside close to Florence. While we were listening to some recordings Jimmy Gelli’s first son Augusto, which at the time was starting to talk, started repeating this strange word. Then again in the car while we were playing again the tracks on the way home. He was very exited and soon it was clear he was giving a name to the music. He was actually saying:-Music! Music!- But it sounded: Punca! Punca! We kept the name. Later on we called Punca a specific area of our music on which we’ve been, and still are very much focused. Our non beat, impulse generated polyrhytmic tracks.
How did jealousy party start and why?
POGO JP started its activities in Florence in 1995. Founded by Roberta on percussions and tapes and myself on vocal duty, soon joined by Edoardo Ricci playing wind instruments, particularly alto saxophone and bass clarinet. It’s just in 2013 that we played again as a duo. But since the very early times mult-instrumentalist Jacopo Andreini and guitarist Nikt Notoni aka Nicotina unsystematically joined us live and for recordings.
JP started as Burp Enterprise collective’s most radical outpost. For musical and management reasons. Musically it was a step forward, or aside, to what the other musical projects of the Burp collective were doing in the previous five years, since the collective was founded. Which was mainly experiments in out-rock in combination with radical improvisation, especially after meeting Edoardo Ricci and guitar player Eugenio Sanna. JP added the sampling element, which very soon evolved in a self sampling method which is still developing today. Through this perspective we went to explore the borders and limits, the shifting moments, between improvised and composed musical material, between live and recorded sound performing. Investigation of real time organization of musical elements and structures, analysis of soloist phrasing as a generator of, first rhythms and then, whole structures.
At the time Bob Ostertag’s Say No More project was highly influential on what we were trying to do. As a live unit we thought JP could have been the tool for performances and actions outside the usual format, like concerts through touring and promoting records. We thought it was more relevant to be a testimonial of our presence in specific living contexts…
WJM … Collective situations, open air demonstrations, house occupations, dinners, breakfasts, parties, with a predilection for self-organized realities. In the context we were operating in, since we weren’t considered very musical, this opened up possibilities for action and performing. For a while we worked with this kind of emotional improvisational spontaneous rock’n’roll thing with collages. It happily embraced a lo-fi aesthetic for several different reasons.
POGO During that time we were collaborating with likeminded realities, participating in collective projects, compilations and systematically recording ourselves. Even if we were constantly releasing our works on our label Burp Publications we never felt the need to record and publish a proper album with JP. For instance the first one, Now, came out in 2006, 11 years after we started. When many things around us were completely changed.
WJM But we all had other different projects doing more or less the regular thing. So it was not a particularly traumatic decision. We just thought that with JP things should have been a bit different. The personnel based on a trio of voice/expanded percussions/wind instruments was open to guest collaborations since the beginning and it remained like that until today. Being activists at the C.P.A. squat in Florence – which between 1995 and 2001 was the place that hosted many working spaces for many different groups and realities, and not just musical ones – the idea of being able to mix with different people, musical elements, and media was quite at hand.
POGO We had started the BURP thing five years before. We were playing and setting up gigs, drawing, writing and publishing rags. The activity in squats in Florence like CPA, BuBu7te and Ex Emerson contributed to the variety of cultural backgrounds of everyone involved. We didn’t have a specific niche or audience to relate with. In a way there was a lot freedom.
WJM We shared the places and a common musical interest in improvisation, which helped mixing knowledge about different approaches.
Specifically strengthening the relation and friendship with core burp members as Edoardo Ricci, guitar player Nicotina and drummer multi instrumentalist Jacopo Andreini.
It was an exciting moment for the ones who wanted to define a space of movement outside the established circuits, with a need of genre crossing and interpollination, but looking for a continuity with a countercultural logic. And this helped the mixing and the intergeneration exchange.
POGO Those years from 1995 and 2001, that I can see as Burp Enterprise’s second phase, where an interesting time to spend in Florence and it might sound odd to many. It was the classic right combination of people in time and space. A nice spurt of creativity, ideas and action. Musically speaking it was the moment where us, coming from a rock background started playing with people from avant-garde jazz and improvised music, guys into hip hop, electronic dance music, experimental and noise. Mixing groups and generations.
It’s much later, in 2007, while we were beginning to work on the album Again that we started to imagine a proper larger group, which eventually became an octet. But unfortunately we didn’t manage to play live and tour extensively in that format, for mainly economical reasons, so I would say we never developed that project as it could have been. We recorded an other album Mercato Centrale and one side of a split 10″ with american duo Talibam! though. Actually there we were nine, with Niccolò Gallio on trombone.
But yes I’ll say that JP had a core composed by, Roberta, Edoardo and I, but always had a close group of people collaborating. Not really open for any kind of collaboration but definitely in dialogue with a larger group of musicians. Jimmy Gelli on electronics, Andrea Caprara on bass and recording and Stefano Bartolini on tenor and baritone saxophones. To name the other most relevant jealousy partisans.
WJM Edoardo Ricci was playing avantgarde jazz at the end of the ’60s and early ’70s with some of the most advanced ensembles in Italy, but very soon he was attracted by more abstract possibilities.
POGO As a matter of fact when we started playing together, around ’94 or ’95, even before Jealousy Party started activities, he was involved in many different experimental projects. There aren’t many musical paths in Italian underground music like that. It’s kind of odd that with JP we had so many problems for the fact of being too “jazzy” because of him; always not fitting well with the noise, the rock, and the experimental scenes. It seems that when people listen to some wind instrument phrasing, almost automatically stores it in the capacious free jazz category. Which is something I find simplistic and disrespectful for the work and explorations of many. Free Jazz for me is a great album from 1961.
At that time in Italy where there strong connections between cities and other musicians doing similar music? Do you feel it has changed?
POGO No there weren’t. At least in our perception, living in a kind of difficult city such Florence. Actually, after the original hardcore punk scene faded, and that was definitely the strongest network I experienced before internet, we had the feeling of being quite isolated. We tried what we could collaborating with people like underground metafilmmakersOgino:knauss, conceptual artists and noise guys like Massimo Contrasto, Steve Rozz coming from the Bambina Precoce and Strano Network experiences, hc and counterculture testimonial Syd Migx, Jo La Face and Officine Cinematografiche, theatre group Kinkaleri, artist Pino Ridolfi, and the amazing N.E.E.M. Orchestra, just to name a few.
But It was actually very hard to find any similar approach. We felt very alone. That’s probably why we started the Burp Enterprise collective. Meeting Jacopo Andreini actually was a big relief. But to establish a new network of contacts was for sure a need we had.
WJM We’ve been collaborating with Circ.A, a circuit of venues, self organized spaces and musicians that was setting Italian tours directly with the musicians, avoiding agencies. Through it we’ve been able to book concerts of guys like Eugene Chadbourne, Evan Parker or Otomo Yoshihide in our squat, just to name the first three coming to my mind.
POGO In 1997 we published a compilation – M.A.O. – Music Against Ourselves, with some bands and projects we were in contact with. Recently revived Snowdonia label, now based in Messina, Sicily, produced another couple of compilations. In an age where records had a completely different relevance in subculture, these albums somehow helped to define the late ’90s Italian underground music scene. It took two or three years more though, before the work of musicians, bands and labels started to be recognized, by the protagonists first. And this process meant finding ourselves in a new, wider scenario, where a new network was eventually starting to operate, where possibilities for collaborations of many kind were opening. Eventually we’ve became part of the OffFest in Milan, which had exactly the aim of connecting all these new realities, particularly labels, which were blossoming around in Italy but they were quite isolated. But that was already 2000 or 2001.
WJM I would like to name the work of Mirko Spino and his Wallace Records. http://www.
POGO Not forgetting Setola di Maiale (http://www.setoladimaiale.
You have also been in Berlin for many years, have you experienced any changes in the music scene during the years you have been there? and has it influenced you, how the music scene in both Italy and Berlin has evolved?
POGO Berlin is still such a vital city I guess it will constantly change. There’s certainly a group of amazing musicians who did some great work in different directions, and specifically about redefining the areas of improvised music. What I experienced directly though, is this chaotic situation where people who worked deeply in a field we could call, for matter of simplification “reductionism” for at least 15 years, found themselves in the need of reinvent themselves; investigating many different fields. Which meant opening again towards noise, avant-garde jazz, experimental rock, modern classical and electronic music. A confusing, but at the same time rich and healthy chaos, which certainly influenced me.
The openness of it was quite refreshing for me. And it gave me the chance to work with inspiring musicians like for instance Ignaz Schick, Burkhard Beins, Michael Renkel, Joke Lanz, Nicholas Wiese – with whom we did an album on Absinth records- and Anders Hana , with whom i had a duo called Pokemachine. He doesn’t live in Berlin anymore though.
At the same time, after a few years, I can say that there’s a lot of uncommunicative worlds as well, like for instance the extreme rock, the hip hop and the left field rhythmical electronic scenes. Interpollination still remains my favorite approach.
WJM Horacio Pollard, Infinite Lives, Delmore FX, NMO, Sea Urchin’, Batalj, Helga Blohm Dynastie, Last Dominion Lost, Magda Mayas, Michael Vorfeld, Vinyl Horror and Terror, JD Zazie are the first batch of names of Berlin based artists and projects i will recommend. But there’s so many. It’s a constant discovery.
POGO But it’s really a perfect place to imagine new combinations and try out collaborations. Like our recent collaboration with drummer Utku Tavil. It just happened. And that’s what I call joy.
how important has your cartoon creation been to your music making? you said you started drawing cartoons when you where 12?
POGO Yes I have always been drawing and I started doing comics at a very young age. Unfortunately I never did animations yet. Actually the Burp Enterprise collective started as a comix magazine. Then we found out we were almost all playing as well, so we naturally started a label. But actually for me the music and the storytelling through sequences of images are not naturally communicating worlds. Of course we worked on that, but there’s always a certain effort needed to put them together.
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