Damiano Pandolfini

I'm saying this more to myself than to you: it would be comforting to find a common thread able to tie my listening habits together in some kind of logic. Instead, the more time passes, the less I manage to make sense of it. All I can say is that I grew up listening to and playing classical music like a real nerdy kid, but at the same time also digging through my older brothers' old records - teenagers in the golden 80s, they had such a wildly mismatched collection that you could jump with a simple flip of the record from David Bowie to Mel & Kim, from Rickie Lee Jones to Valerie Dore, from Tom Waits to Rick Astley and from the Beatles to Sandra. Somehow I feel like I still carry all the after-effects: a jukebox with no logic, other than that of my own memories. These days I dabble in r&b and (neo)soul, jazz and tropicalia, synth-pop and dance, lo-fi griminess and dub, downtempo and French touch, electro-pop and disco music. And because of that childhood legacy, I still harbour an embarrassing interest in the most shameless chart-topping bubblegum-pop, the kind made by wobbly little starlets who fade out within a season, and by great Divas with an easy high-pitched squeal (all of them, naturally, under the patronage of the enormous Mariah Carey). Maybe it's better to let my beloved Saint Etienne explain it, then: if I could, I'd go and live in this video, I'd sit in the back seat next to Sarah, watching this alienating city I live in today unwind endlessly beneath the tyres. In the background, acid-house and 60s vocal groups, alt-dance and indie-pop...