DJ Balli - Breakcore belligerence tactics

“Modern, wide-ranging, relaxing, vegetative, post-organic: all these adjectives are often used to describe electronic music. With DJ Balli, things are different”: a tagline that reads like a manifesto, sparing the interviewer the thankless task of taxonomy. Riccardo Balli certainly knows how to make a striking introduction, but he's even better at scattering red herrings. As the man himself suggests, it's easier to pin down what this unhinged electronic harlequin's art is NOT: the scraps for his suit have been cut from the most disparate wardrobes, stitched together with the needle of a machine-gun turntable. It's no surprise that his second-to-last book is devoted to the practice of mash-up, nor that his chosen territory is the pummeling chaos of breakcore, of which he remains the undisputed homegrown prophet.

Let's feel our way through this, if only to keep the few remaining readers on board: Riccardo Balli is a DJ, a record producer and an essayist; an iconoclastic spirit driven by an amusing prankster-plunderphonic streak; an intellectual who prefers exhausting nights in clubs to university lecture halls (though he's never once taken drugs in his life); a man who wrote his thesis on the Residents, who once passed himself off as Billy Corgan, who's manhandled the turntables alongside pizza makers and skateboarders; who has probed the subliminal links between ravers and boy scouts, gabber and futurists, opera and horrorcore. What's certain is that he's a 24-karat Bolognese, who in the turbulent Nineties was exactly where he needed to be (from the subversive forge of the Link to the pataphysical performances of Aldo Vignocchi's Kavalla Kavalla, the Pantera's own David Thomas).

Despite championing a decidedly uncompromising kind of music, you've always approached your mission with a playful, ironic spirit: an attitude that I find true to the most authentic spirit of the historic avant-gardes you love, and which, in part, also ties back to the concept of “homo ludens” theorized by the Situationists. In short, the exact opposite of the stale, second-rate self-importance that afflicts too many “sonic terrorists”… Certain figures remind me of the amusing chapter in “T.A.Z.” where Hakim Bey mocks the pompous seriousness and bland doom-mongering of “oppositional” art. Do you also notice this festering plague? And what inspires the lightness of your own touch instead?

I absolutely notice it, especially in certain power electronics artists…

Funny you say that, I was thinking of exactly them!

But not only them – also in techno-industrial and that whole kind of imagery…

An imagery that's fake-dark, dressed up in Apocalypse as if it couldn't be any other way…

The reason I embrace a more ironic outlook is precisely that I can't take these figures and these subgenres seriously – to me they have no real innovative specificity: they're just gimmicks that work for a season or two. My own poetics can therefore only be playful and ludic, as you put it. I wouldn't rule out nihilism, because subjecting everything to a demented irony is, in a way, tantamount to questioning everything. But being a nihilist presupposes at least believing in nihilism, whereas I'm for the negation of any and all worldviews.

Could this “positive” attitude of yours (in the arithmetic sense of +/-, not the moral sense of good/evil) have inherited something from your past as a “straight edge”? A rather unusual lifestyle for a DJ…

The word “positive,” though, feels a bit at odds with my idea, behind which lies precisely a self-cynical awareness of irony as the last weapon we have left. This parallel is interesting, though, jumping from one thing to another just like I would! I don't consider myself a true straight edge, in the sense that I don't have that kind of rigidity (even though I was one between the ages of 19 and 21, when I played that kind of stuff and it was still something new), but it's a subject that still interests me. My label makes music for the dancefloor, and therefore for the body: it short-circuits the brain and unfolds through instinctive reactions. It's a field historically dominated by substance use, as documented by a vast and often illuminating body of literature, and this has imposed a “zombie rave” diktat: if the music has to accompany the pill kicking in, it can't be too complicated. An extreme genre like mine runs into trouble everywhere, in clubs and at raves alike. My record “Boyscout-Ravers Must Die!” actually takes its cue from an amusing personal anecdote: in 2006 I played an illegal rave near Verona, a classic tribe-techno situation in which a girl, exasperated by my set, at one point screamed at me to stop and even went as far as throwing a bucket of water at me! Naturally I carried on undeterred, and that's when the idea came to me to pair boy scouts and ravers as two sides of the same coin: it's no coincidence that both go off into the woods and wear a uniform. On that record I remixed old boy scout songs, dropping in typically breakcore amen breaks and a gabber kick drum, interspersed with deranged spoken excerpts from American films: a good-natured jab at that world and the drug cult that goes along with it.

And what about from punk in general — what do you feel you've taken from it?

Definitely the DIY attitude, which can only come from there, as well as from the historical avant-gardes (there's a great book by Greil Marcus, "Lipstick Traces", which looks precisely at the connecting thread between Dada and punk). There's always this pairing of avant-garde and tradition, especially since by now there's a well-established tradition of the avant-garde that creates the pretensions we all know, and which we push back against. That's one of the reasons I reject the term "experimental", a word I find devoid of any practical content: those who make "experimental music" more often than not are just recycling the variety of movements that developed throughout the 20th century. 

The very antithesis of experimentation and the avant-garde, in other words.

I find everything that comes from the world of dance music far more experimental, even from a socio-anthropological point of view. That's why, with my label, I chose to embrace that dimension — although with the sub-labels "+Belligeranza" and "-Belligeranza" I've explored things that lean more noise and more "soft" respectively: for instance, lately I've been having fun with this new-new age that mocks the triumph of ambient, a genre I particularly detest…

…and one that's now lording it over everything with great pomp.

The list of things I detest would be a long one, but generally speaking let's say I'm interested in avoiding experimentation and instead sticking very closely to what's contemporary, to the novelties coming out of London, Berlin or New York, which involve street culture and turn into interconnected laboratories of clothing and behaviour. I find it far more experimental to forge these sub-musical languages, rich as they are in aesthetic openings.

I've always been fascinated by your boundless omnivorousness, which leads you not to reject the dreaded "rock music" that the pseudo-experimentalists mentioned above love to snarl at whenever they get the chance. Even in your most irreverent parodies, I don't read a demolition drive in the style of Matmos, but rather an affectionate pat on the back, with none of that sterile Manichean past/present-young/old-good/bad divide.

I'd say so, yes. My approach is very conceptual — maybe because I'm not trained as a musician. But it's not that I boast about it like Brian Eno does; it's that I really just am not one…

You were a drummer, though…

Not by chance, the one who doesn't know the notes… After my philosophy studies in aesthetics, I threw myself into djing, which is precisely a way of looking at music conceptually. I'm talking to you about music in the fullest sense, without setting any limits, from Bolognese polka to Hawaiian guitars. Anything is possible on my label, the blender keeps spinning. It should also be said that for some years now, rather than inventing new things, we've really been talking about recombining the pieces of a Frankenstein. Sure, every now and then some macro-code pops up, but essentially the last real leap forward was with the rave culture of the '90s — even though, as I told you, I never liked raves and I don't want anything to do with them…

Do you dance?

Very little… In any case, whether we like it or not, raves were the last mass movement that tried to look into the future. After that we entered this retromaniacal phase in which, for now, I don't see any other openings.

Let me jump on that: this breath on our necks of "the end of" is getting heavier and heavier, as if the frontiers left to conquer had drastically shrunk. This constant sense of already-heard haunts our beloved "extreme" music above all (whether "experimental" or not): breaking new taboos looks increasingly like a pipe dream, and in the electronic field the chase after the next beat is already running out of breath, even when dissonance and mixing are pushed to the max. Do you still happen to come across music capable of shaking you up, of coming across as violent, of hurting you on both an acoustic and a philosophical level?

I don't see anything like that, except, paradoxically, for a few more melodic things that maybe don't hurt me, but that certainly make me think: I'm thinking, for instance, of chiptune and how it gets bastardized, with its somewhat unsettling, "satanic" streak…

Many are prophesying this necessary "return to melody", as if the attempt to erase it so brutally had created a downward spiral we can no longer climb out of.

Even the spirit of these artists is worth appreciating: some of them tour and come close to the mainstream, but otherwise there's a rejection of careerism, and the music remains tied to the parallel universe of video games and augmented reality (after all, we're talking about a scene made up mostly of nerds and tinkerers). In general, the approach to obsolete technologies opens up genuine retrofuturistic perspectives, even if the "rush" doesn't always come. Speaking of which, a few years ago I made a 1400 bpm record with Ralph Brown called "Tweet It! Extratone Mix": the reference is to extratone, an extreme version of speedcore that goes above 1000 bpm, to the point where you stop even hearing the kick drum...

A drone, basically...

Exactly, but with its own dynamic drive: our provocation was actually to keep treating it as dancefloor music. And believe me: at a set in Germany, at 5 in the morning and under the influence of who knows what drugs, people were actually dancing!

Maybe because the shockwave, even if stationary, still moves some muscle or nerve...

And now there are people who show up and dance in an "arthritic" way, just moving their hands...

A sort of danceable answer to the gestural music of Cage & co.!

Then there are these absurd characters, shaved-headed and motionless, who just sway or shake their fists... Anyway, to get back to your original question, that stuff does give you some kind of rush, even if after half an hour you're already sick of it... It's not a scene I can take entirely seriously.

When I asked the question I was actually thinking of the barrages of extratone beats, and I was wondering whether such a breathless, parossistic sprint could somehow take off or was doomed to crash...

Let's have a laugh about it: there's even talk of extratone subgenres, like "moetone", which adds little Japanese female vocals... But we're talking about things invented by whichever DJ happens to be around, known to maybe 50 people in the whole world.

Always self-proclaimed movements, in other words, that are born and die right there.

For that matter there's also "supertone", which reaches millions of bpm... At this point we're in the realm of jokes, but also of conceptual operations that in their own way fascinate me, and that I keep an eye on, even without embracing them wholeheartedly.

In your music there's certainly a substantial conceptual apparatus, built on dense liner notes if not outright para-terrorist communiqués, but also a strong performative element: your live shows are marked by great physicality, with frantic movements punctuating the rape of the turntable, harking back to the original art of the DJ as a manipulator of matter rather than to the noise collages of Christian Marclay or Milan Knizak. Performance also in the sense of happening, in some cases: projects like "Bally Corgan" verge almost on theatre, complete with rigorous staging and dedicated performers. In short, you're anything but a lab rat.

Basically I try to do the things that are fun for me: I do them if they're fun. These forays into other fields (I'm thinking also of "In Skatebored We Noize!") are driven precisely by my desire to freely follow the ideas that excite me most. I've never tried to please anyone in particular; whoever doesn't like what I come up with is free to just ignore me.

An approach you've managed to carry over into your writing as well...

Ever since my first record "Rave In Space" (released in '99, so a year before the launch of Sonic Belligeranza) and my first book "Anche tu astronauta" (published in '98 by Castelvecchi), I've been pursuing this parallel idea of "dj-philosophy" or "literary remix", meaning that my essays are put together using the same method as my sets: taking other people's material and stirring it into a mash-up, all filtered through a particular interpretive lens (think of my book on gabber seen through the lens of Futurism, focusing on every possible point of contact: speed, the warmongering aspect, the accusations of right-wing leanings, the tracksuit fashion...). I like playing with this cultural jamming in which I effectively "mix", with a crossfader, two turntables of concepts, generating new ones out of them. It's a hybrid reading aimed at a kind of literature that goes beyond the fences of music criticism. What matters, in books as in records, is to always come across as unpredictable (just to give you an idea, right now I'm working on a project that mixes rockabilly and 8-bit!), to infect the underground and keep the fun factor high.

I really appreciate that you didn't use the word "clash"…

These ideas are a way of getting out of the socio-political cliché of confrontation, which interests me too, but only when accompanied by reflection. I see too many men and women of slogans, whereas for me revolution has nothing to do with numbers and can only be achieved through reasoning.

Since you brought politics into it, let's close with something more down-to-earth, in the literal sense of the ground we walk on: as a true Bologna native, how much do you find this city has changed, the one you meticulously dissected in your sound archive "Bolognoise"? 

It's changed a lot, as it inevitably had to. I call myself a child of the Link of the '90s, a remarkable laboratory of experimentation that stood out across Europe for the originality of what it produced. That spirit is now a thing of the past, but there are still plenty of interesting things going on. It remains a city full of young people, the lifeblood of any scene, and that makes me optimistic about the future. We're always talking about a province of the empire, but one capable of producing stimulating input.

You once told me that, in your view, Bologna's 2010s were clearly preferable to the 2000s: a clear dig at the suicidal policies of sheriff Cofferati…

I have no doubts about that, and the 2020s seem to be following the same path. During the 2000s, because of an unfortunate administration, we risked falling below the minimum standard a city like this should have.

Ride the wave of great music

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