Interview: Onga from Boring Machines
Without doubt Boring Machines is one of my favourite labels and an important one as well - it consistently releases quality music from artists known and unknown. On a personal level the label 'introduced' me to the music of Heroin In Tahiti for which I will always be grateful. The roster of releases reads as a veritable 'Who's Who' of Italian outsider music and played a major part in the rise of Italian Occult Psychedelia. The label's head honcho Onga was kind enough to spare some time to answer some questions.
"Boring Machines consistently releases top quality music - what is your criteria for a possible release?
Thanks for your kind comment, I’m glad when someone who’s not in my strict filter bubble appreciates what I do. Most of the time I have a feeling there’s a lot of patting in the shoulders between comrades and I don’t think it’s a good thing. Boring Machines is not genre-specific, so there’s no specific criteria on how to choose a possible release, except that the artist has to be italian. That is the only rule that I applied right after the beninning, because my mission was to help promoting music by italian artists (living anywhere) outside of our country. Even with the great tools of the internet, Italy is still a bit “exotic” when it comes to music, North America and the UK still plays the big part and other parts of Europe too. So, in a very smart move, I decided to go against the stream.
Usually it starts with some chatting with people I already know or whose work I was aware of and I liked it. When I receive a music proposal I listen to it as many times as I can. The more I am able to listen to it, the greater chance to be considered for a release. I have to admit that in most cases I can’t reach the end of it actually, my “filter” is set pretty high, I listen to a proposal as it was a record I am about to buy, so I ask myself, would I spend money for this?
The number of good proposals eventually exceeds my capacity of releasing them, so the choice is hard sometimes.
What music / artists are your own personal influences?
I am an avid record collector and listener first, the idea of being active with djing, setting up gigs and starting a label came later.
Personally I had my first real epiphany with early techno, in 1989/1990 and even if I’m not a clubber anymore, I still love when I find some good hammers to listen to. From techno to ambient, thanks to the chill-out zones of the early mornings after the club the path was brief. Then in the mid nineties I started to listen to rock music again, or that thing called post-rock at the times, in all its variations. I’m also a fan of all things “western” so anything with a tremolo on the guitar always gets me. I think the center of gravity of all this it’s complex to describe, too many names to mention.
If you ask me to pick up the notorius “top five” I would say anything from Autechre, anything from Labradford, “Selected Ambient Works vol.2” by Aphex Twin, a compilation of Morricone stuff and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “ F#A# ∞ “. Beyond listening to these sounds, it’s their imagery that I’m really fond of. Those, and many others, where records where the music, the artwork, the ideas behind the whole project were really a world to dive in. Labels like Constellation, Warp, Kranky have always been a great example for me and with Boring Machines I try to find my own way to do that particular job of putting out records that have an identity, that are as timeless as possible. I’m not interested in the current trend, I want to listen to my records in twenty years and still think they’re ok.
What do you think to the whole 'Italian Occult Psychedelic' tag - I admit I'm guilty of using it myself - does it adequately describe the music or just a handy label?
There’s for sure a common thread for many of the bands that have been included in the tag. In a period where the experimental/free music from our heritage of the seventies/eighties is being rediscovered, a number of bands are picking up some traits of that music, be it tribalism/naturalism, be it the giallo/horror, be it the first electronic music and putting them into new music. As always, with any tag that journous attach to music, there has been discussions if it really fitted this or that band, if it really meant something. You know there’s always someone who tries to make distinctions, as soon as a band feels “trapped” by a tag they try to disengage, same old story.
I’m old enough to remember the sections in the record shops, but it works the same with online sales, and I think that labels, which are like boxes where to put similar things are useful, they can direct a listener towards other records he didn’t know. I’m talking pragmatism here, this is my salesmen outfit: if we call “Italian Occult Psychedelia” music like Heroin in Tahiti and La Piramide di Sangue, and in the same box we also put other three names who are not the same, but similar, with the same feeling, maybe (maybe) we can sell those records to the people who liked Heroin in Tahiti. If we don’t, those sales are lost. I’m not talking about money making here, but maybe more sustainable releases, more live gigs for the bands, more people to meet, more beers to drink.” United we stand, divided we fall” eh?
Unfortunately, I had to reckon with the fact that many friends lost more time in making distinctions or joking about it than trying to capitalize. Others would have jumped on a van screaming “I.O.P.” and made a scene about it instead.
There is so much interesting and challenging music coming out of Italy - in your view is this somehow a reflection of the country itself?
Italian music heritage was somehow lost during the eighties and the nineties, I connect it with the spread of commercial television and the constant descent towards the annihilation of the cultural system, from schools to any institutional place. It hasn’t been like that in the past: RAI, our national radio/TV system was central to many of the experimental waves that was going on in the fifties and sixties, composers like Stockhausen and Cage came here to work with italian composers like Nono, Berio, Maderna and many others. We have Morricone, and the things he’s famous for maybe are one tenth of what he did and are being rediscovered just recently. There’s been an awful lot of great stuff going on for a while. Then I think music made in Italy just stepped out of the radar, but it kept being alive, and maybe the difficulties we had to emerge, confronted with North America or UK discouraged a bit the scenes. As a canadian friend told me once, when asked how come there was so much great music coming out of there, once you get ignored for a long time by the cool people, you give up trying to compete (read: emulate) and you just start doing your own thing. Italy have been ignored for a long time so, yes, there’s a lot of great music coming out of it right now.
I owe you a personal thankyou for introducing me to the music of Heroin In Tahiti, now a lifelong favourite. That album [Sun & Violence] appears to have opened up the whole IOP scene to a much bigger audience - is that how you see it?
“Sun and Violence”, together with “Death Surf”, is one of my best sellers, both in physical and digital version. Having no regular distribution with the label through the usual channels I am happy I reached customers in countries I didn’t know there was an interest or knowledge for my bands. What makes me happy is that, since the beginning Heroin in Tahiti was a new name and I didn’t make any special advertisement, PR campaign or anything. Their quality spoke for themselves. At the time of writing I just shipped one of the last copies of Death Surf to Mexico and one in South Africa.
As I mentioned earlier, we could have done better, I consider Heroin in Tahiti a feasible mainstream record, but it’s fun anyway.
The 'outsider' scene in Italy seems to be quite a tight knit one - a genuine camaraderie between artists and labels....less a scene and more of a community?
Oh well! I can’t decide if to use one definition or the other, but for sure many of us are long time friends, we shared many experiences together, many artists played the same underground festivals, helped each other on technical issues. But most of all, and you should know how important to italians that is, we sat together many times eating all the edibles that were around in a square mile. That’s when you cement the deals, that’s where you get to know each other.
The Thalassa festival is obviously no more - any plans to 'replace' it - it looked a fantastic showcase for IOP/outsider music.
Thalassa was centered and tailored around the Dal Verme venue in Rome. After the success of the first edition, we talked the possibility of moving it elsewhere, the concert room of Dal Verme is very small, fits an hundred when extremely packed. But it wouldn’t be the same so we kept on doing it there until 2016, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Boring Machines. Then the problems with the neighborhood and the local administration became harsher and in 2017, right before the period of Thalassa, Dal Verme shut down. During the summer of 2017 there’s has been a smaller summer version but it obviously wasn’t the same. Now the roman crew is trying to understand how to move and hopefully in the future there will be a stable situation that allows to revive Thalassa.
In the meantime, I feel obliged to mention another festival, born when Thalassa was clearly not happening last year. It’s name its Zuma, it runs in a super nice old farmhouse right outside the city of Milan, and even if slightly different, with many acts also from abroad, is the favourite cousin of Thalassa. The Dal Verme crew was there with the cocktail bar to mark the kinship. Last year at Zuma we saw Futuro Antico, Rainbow Island, Halfalib, DSR Lines, Jooklo Duo & Gaetano Liguori Free Mind Jazz Explosion, Mandolin Sisters, Mike Cooper, Trapcoustic, Jealousy Party, Embryo, Squadra Omega, King Ayisoba and many others. This year’s second edition goes on June 1st/2nd/3rd and it promises to be great again (no pun intended).
Any future plans re: Boring Machines you can let us in on?
There’s four new releases coming out this month of March, Maurizio Abate, the collaborative LP between Paolo Spaccamonti and Jochen Arbeit, The Star Pillow and the new solo from Luciano Lamanna of DIVUS.
Until mid April there’s no way of pressing records, due to the much hated, clownish, RSD, but I can anticipate that before the summer a new Heroin in Tahiti album will surface and I can only define its contents as “total”. Then there’s much more in the works, but before that maybe a little holiday, which is well deserved after 12 non-stop years.
Any artists we need to keep an eye out for in the future?
I bet on a couple of names that are worth attention right now: Serpentu who are from Tuscany if the information I have are correct, who are a crude and dissonant trio which reminds me of Father Murphy, which is always a good thing. Then Saba Saba whose record will be out soon for our friends at Maple Death, I saw them live right after they finished recordings and they are an amazing blend of dark isolationist off-kilter machines, tape recorders and the earthy beat of primordial dancehall dub productions.
Cheers Onga!!
"Boring Machines consistently releases top quality music - what is your criteria for a possible release?
Thanks for your kind comment, I’m glad when someone who’s not in my strict filter bubble appreciates what I do. Most of the time I have a feeling there’s a lot of patting in the shoulders between comrades and I don’t think it’s a good thing. Boring Machines is not genre-specific, so there’s no specific criteria on how to choose a possible release, except that the artist has to be italian. That is the only rule that I applied right after the beninning, because my mission was to help promoting music by italian artists (living anywhere) outside of our country. Even with the great tools of the internet, Italy is still a bit “exotic” when it comes to music, North America and the UK still plays the big part and other parts of Europe too. So, in a very smart move, I decided to go against the stream.
Usually it starts with some chatting with people I already know or whose work I was aware of and I liked it. When I receive a music proposal I listen to it as many times as I can. The more I am able to listen to it, the greater chance to be considered for a release. I have to admit that in most cases I can’t reach the end of it actually, my “filter” is set pretty high, I listen to a proposal as it was a record I am about to buy, so I ask myself, would I spend money for this?
The number of good proposals eventually exceeds my capacity of releasing them, so the choice is hard sometimes.
What music / artists are your own personal influences?
I am an avid record collector and listener first, the idea of being active with djing, setting up gigs and starting a label came later.
Personally I had my first real epiphany with early techno, in 1989/1990 and even if I’m not a clubber anymore, I still love when I find some good hammers to listen to. From techno to ambient, thanks to the chill-out zones of the early mornings after the club the path was brief. Then in the mid nineties I started to listen to rock music again, or that thing called post-rock at the times, in all its variations. I’m also a fan of all things “western” so anything with a tremolo on the guitar always gets me. I think the center of gravity of all this it’s complex to describe, too many names to mention.
If you ask me to pick up the notorius “top five” I would say anything from Autechre, anything from Labradford, “Selected Ambient Works vol.2” by Aphex Twin, a compilation of Morricone stuff and Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “ F#A# ∞ “. Beyond listening to these sounds, it’s their imagery that I’m really fond of. Those, and many others, where records where the music, the artwork, the ideas behind the whole project were really a world to dive in. Labels like Constellation, Warp, Kranky have always been a great example for me and with Boring Machines I try to find my own way to do that particular job of putting out records that have an identity, that are as timeless as possible. I’m not interested in the current trend, I want to listen to my records in twenty years and still think they’re ok.
What do you think to the whole 'Italian Occult Psychedelic' tag - I admit I'm guilty of using it myself - does it adequately describe the music or just a handy label?
There’s for sure a common thread for many of the bands that have been included in the tag. In a period where the experimental/free music from our heritage of the seventies/eighties is being rediscovered, a number of bands are picking up some traits of that music, be it tribalism/naturalism, be it the giallo/horror, be it the first electronic music and putting them into new music. As always, with any tag that journous attach to music, there has been discussions if it really fitted this or that band, if it really meant something. You know there’s always someone who tries to make distinctions, as soon as a band feels “trapped” by a tag they try to disengage, same old story.
I’m old enough to remember the sections in the record shops, but it works the same with online sales, and I think that labels, which are like boxes where to put similar things are useful, they can direct a listener towards other records he didn’t know. I’m talking pragmatism here, this is my salesmen outfit: if we call “Italian Occult Psychedelia” music like Heroin in Tahiti and La Piramide di Sangue, and in the same box we also put other three names who are not the same, but similar, with the same feeling, maybe (maybe) we can sell those records to the people who liked Heroin in Tahiti. If we don’t, those sales are lost. I’m not talking about money making here, but maybe more sustainable releases, more live gigs for the bands, more people to meet, more beers to drink.” United we stand, divided we fall” eh?
Unfortunately, I had to reckon with the fact that many friends lost more time in making distinctions or joking about it than trying to capitalize. Others would have jumped on a van screaming “I.O.P.” and made a scene about it instead.
There is so much interesting and challenging music coming out of Italy - in your view is this somehow a reflection of the country itself?
Italian music heritage was somehow lost during the eighties and the nineties, I connect it with the spread of commercial television and the constant descent towards the annihilation of the cultural system, from schools to any institutional place. It hasn’t been like that in the past: RAI, our national radio/TV system was central to many of the experimental waves that was going on in the fifties and sixties, composers like Stockhausen and Cage came here to work with italian composers like Nono, Berio, Maderna and many others. We have Morricone, and the things he’s famous for maybe are one tenth of what he did and are being rediscovered just recently. There’s been an awful lot of great stuff going on for a while. Then I think music made in Italy just stepped out of the radar, but it kept being alive, and maybe the difficulties we had to emerge, confronted with North America or UK discouraged a bit the scenes. As a canadian friend told me once, when asked how come there was so much great music coming out of there, once you get ignored for a long time by the cool people, you give up trying to compete (read: emulate) and you just start doing your own thing. Italy have been ignored for a long time so, yes, there’s a lot of great music coming out of it right now.
I owe you a personal thankyou for introducing me to the music of Heroin In Tahiti, now a lifelong favourite. That album [Sun & Violence] appears to have opened up the whole IOP scene to a much bigger audience - is that how you see it?
“Sun and Violence”, together with “Death Surf”, is one of my best sellers, both in physical and digital version. Having no regular distribution with the label through the usual channels I am happy I reached customers in countries I didn’t know there was an interest or knowledge for my bands. What makes me happy is that, since the beginning Heroin in Tahiti was a new name and I didn’t make any special advertisement, PR campaign or anything. Their quality spoke for themselves. At the time of writing I just shipped one of the last copies of Death Surf to Mexico and one in South Africa.
As I mentioned earlier, we could have done better, I consider Heroin in Tahiti a feasible mainstream record, but it’s fun anyway.
The 'outsider' scene in Italy seems to be quite a tight knit one - a genuine camaraderie between artists and labels....less a scene and more of a community?
Oh well! I can’t decide if to use one definition or the other, but for sure many of us are long time friends, we shared many experiences together, many artists played the same underground festivals, helped each other on technical issues. But most of all, and you should know how important to italians that is, we sat together many times eating all the edibles that were around in a square mile. That’s when you cement the deals, that’s where you get to know each other.
The Thalassa festival is obviously no more - any plans to 'replace' it - it looked a fantastic showcase for IOP/outsider music.
Thalassa was centered and tailored around the Dal Verme venue in Rome. After the success of the first edition, we talked the possibility of moving it elsewhere, the concert room of Dal Verme is very small, fits an hundred when extremely packed. But it wouldn’t be the same so we kept on doing it there until 2016, coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Boring Machines. Then the problems with the neighborhood and the local administration became harsher and in 2017, right before the period of Thalassa, Dal Verme shut down. During the summer of 2017 there’s has been a smaller summer version but it obviously wasn’t the same. Now the roman crew is trying to understand how to move and hopefully in the future there will be a stable situation that allows to revive Thalassa.
In the meantime, I feel obliged to mention another festival, born when Thalassa was clearly not happening last year. It’s name its Zuma, it runs in a super nice old farmhouse right outside the city of Milan, and even if slightly different, with many acts also from abroad, is the favourite cousin of Thalassa. The Dal Verme crew was there with the cocktail bar to mark the kinship. Last year at Zuma we saw Futuro Antico, Rainbow Island, Halfalib, DSR Lines, Jooklo Duo & Gaetano Liguori Free Mind Jazz Explosion, Mandolin Sisters, Mike Cooper, Trapcoustic, Jealousy Party, Embryo, Squadra Omega, King Ayisoba and many others. This year’s second edition goes on June 1st/2nd/3rd and it promises to be great again (no pun intended).
Any future plans re: Boring Machines you can let us in on?
There’s four new releases coming out this month of March, Maurizio Abate, the collaborative LP between Paolo Spaccamonti and Jochen Arbeit, The Star Pillow and the new solo from Luciano Lamanna of DIVUS.
Until mid April there’s no way of pressing records, due to the much hated, clownish, RSD, but I can anticipate that before the summer a new Heroin in Tahiti album will surface and I can only define its contents as “total”. Then there’s much more in the works, but before that maybe a little holiday, which is well deserved after 12 non-stop years.
Any artists we need to keep an eye out for in the future?
I bet on a couple of names that are worth attention right now: Serpentu who are from Tuscany if the information I have are correct, who are a crude and dissonant trio which reminds me of Father Murphy, which is always a good thing. Then Saba Saba whose record will be out soon for our friends at Maple Death, I saw them live right after they finished recordings and they are an amazing blend of dark isolationist off-kilter machines, tape recorders and the earthy beat of primordial dancehall dub productions.
Cheers Onga!!
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