St.Ride - St. Ride - The Foundry of the Spirit

My “relationship” with St.ride began purely by chance in 2010 when, among the pile of promos that regularly landed at my house, I found “Waves“, an album on which the duo Grandi-Gusmerini experimented with shortwave radio. It wasn't love at first listen — quite the opposite. Luckily, shortly after came “Looking for Nothing“, a work that made me completely change my mind about the duo's potential. Even today, that record remains my favourite by the Genoese outfit (I'll go further: I consider it one of the peaks of Italian rock in recent years…), suspended between no-wave extremism and dada-noise, between the abstraction of the digital and the harsh, cold physicality of the analogue. Little by little, I also caught up with all their previous work, while I kept regularly receiving their dispatches, ever more alien and cryptic, as if to underline a sense of otherness even with respect to the Italian underground itself. These days, Solar Ipse Audio House is releasing their new work, “Deutschland Femdom”, an album that, once again, shows the duo's determination to carry on their experimental discourse, creating a fascinating and enigmatic sonic scenario in which the sounds of life forms trying to resist their own gradual destructuring (“Sotto docce di petroli”) coexist with the deformations of the interstices between silence and noise (“Dispiega le sue piume”) and the liquid wonder of a void that pulses ceaselessly (“Mormorando evi fugaci”). A record to be listened to strictly on headphones, eyes closed, immersed in darkness. Perhaps right after reading what the good Maurizio Gusmerini was willing to reveal to us in a long conversation.

Let's start from the beginning: how did that strange creature known as St.ride come about?

“Strange creature” — I like that. We're going back to the end of the last century. Edo was looking for a partner, so a mutual friend introduced us. Edo came from a long background as a studio technician and various experimental work. I, on the other hand, was just a huge music enthusiast — I did some DJing in my spare time, and I've always loved dancing, even if you wouldn't guess it from listening to our stuff.

St.ride stands for “stride”, hinting at a kind of music that's abrasive, disturbed and disturbing?

The name St.ride came out of a séance — back then I used to hang out with friends who liked doing that sort of thing. Once they were trying to summon someone's relative, and instead Duchamp's ghost showed up, stammering something like “stststst…”, so I thought I'd attach something to those two letters. Then we put a full stop in the middle to leave the meaning more open to free interpretation. I like the “ride” part — the comic side matters to us, even if it's not always so obvious.

Before St.ride, what were you up to? Did you have other musical projects?

I had nothing — I just bought and listened to a lot of records. Edo had a musical project of his own, but I barely know anything about it.

Your “first” record that I listened to, “Waves”, I didn't like. It was an assemblage of interference and transmissions intercepted on shortwave radio. What do you remember from that period?

We had just finished “Compassion and resentment”, which was a fairly physical record. I had dozens of cassettes full of recordings I'd made off shortwave radio. There was a period when I was recording constantly. I'd entered a world apart. We made a selection out of it and Edo gave the sound a bit of a tidy-up. If I'm honest, we still like it — we think it's a solid piece of work for what it sets out to do and for what the intention behind it was.

Right around the release of that record, you said: “There's no such thing as difficult music, only an audience that's more or less prepared to receive it”. Do you still feel that way?

Yes, but I'd also add willingness to listen. The more open we are, the more wonders we discover.

Right after that came “Looking for Nothing”, a record that left me stunned by the leap in quality. Back then, I talked about a mix of dada-noise, harsh-noise and post-rock. To this day, I still consider it your best record, as well as one of the most important records in Italian “rock” of recent years.

Thanks Francesco, we're really honored that you think so highly of it. For us that record was an evolution of “Compassion and resentment”, which was an instrumental album. We felt there could be room for a voice… that's the spirit we made it in. Plus our friend Ics's drumming fit right into it.

The lyrics of “Looking for Nothing” walked a razor's edge between nonsense and neurosis. What kind of atmosphere did they come out of?

It was a period of senseless neurosis! Maybe I was reading Satie's “I quaderni di un mammifero”… I don't know, they just come out like that, even now. Maybe now I'd like them to be a bit less neurotic, while still keeping the senselessness, eh! Although you could say that nonsense draws attention to sense…

Reading your lyrics, I always feel there's a lot of literature, a lot of poetry and probably even a bit of philosophy behind it all… is that right?

I want to sound banal, but in the end it's always life. It grinds everything up, poetry, literature and philosophy. Everyone produces their own mush. And it's the mush that has to give you something, the ingredients are already in the air.

Among your lyrics, I remember flashes of pure “romanticism” (“Non ho soluzioni/ a pretese del cazzo/ mi suona nel cesso/ nel cesso di un bar/ io ci vado spesso/ ma piscio soltanto/ son dentro e rispondo/ e schizzo per terra…” – from “Autodifesa”, on “Autodifesa”), alongside the various examples of nonsense…

Eh… it's hard to talk about the lyrics, they speak for themselves… I don't know if it's intentional, but they're often little stagings, where there's something real and something imagined. I try to put in something lopsided or exaggerated, but not far removed from a possible reality. Exaggeration is a good comic device. I don't know if I always manage to bring out the comic side.

Ah, yes… when “Out“ came out, I remember words like these: “The sense of the comic is derived through the exasperation of the tragic”.

It's like Laurel & Hardy: they're sublime in the tragedy that comedy is.

“Primitive”, on the other hand, is your most cryptic record, the sonic transfiguration of “a cruel, ridiculous, cynical and desperate story, told in the language Mongoholi Nasi uses to speak to wild dogs”.

We liked the idea of being able not to say but to allude, to tell the untellable, the human condition of being a freak, as we all are. It was a record that came out almost in one go, with simple ideas, and also a bit crooked ones.

Let's dig a bit deeper into this “human condition of being a freak”…

It's that we're all here together, cast adrift on this rock in an infinite universe, in the midst of eternity. We know we'll all die, we're afraid, everyone reacts in their own way, creating their own rules and habits. Every one of us, looked at impartially, reveals our own absurdities, our own cruelty, our own weaknesses, those things about ourselves we'd never want to see. But, in a way, we're all a bit pathetic, ridiculous, in this desperate search for self-defense. It would be enough if we loved each other…

Can music help?

Yes, it helps to be even freakier!

“Compassion and resentment” is one of your most extreme records and one of the most compact overall. An annihilating stream of consciousness, somewhere between musique concrète and wild noise-making. As the sounds wash over us, it feels like being in the presence of a real “foundry of the spirit”.

I'm glad you brought up that phrase, "foundry of the spirit" — I actually think it's perfect, and it also describes the record's production process well. During that phase we really went hard at it… Then there was a reaction to what we'd done before, the urge to try different systems, with another approach, more mic-based. We also always put a lot of work into titles, and there are some good ones here too, ones that spark something when they meet the music.

Which records shaped you?

A neighbor of mine lent me two tapes by Area (“Arbeit Macht Frei” and Crack!) and one by Guccini, and I loved Area. I also had the privilege of seeing them live with Demetrio. Everything else after that is too much to list. I have to say that from the 2000s onward I also found a huge amount of fantastic music I never would have imagined. Jandek, Sun City Girls, Merzbow, The Shadow Ring and everything that followed from it, Nmperign, Supersilent, Drexciya and all its offshoots, and then Arthur Russell, whom I first listened to right around that time. Then Bach and contemporary music, especially Satie and Cage. Edo, on the other hand, it was Kraftwerk. All of Kraftwerk. Full stop.

Speaking of Area, on your first record, the self-titled one from 2001 released on Snowdonia (a record closer to pure and simple electronics, albeit made impure by gaps, fractures, deviations, etc.), you quote the famous theme from “Luglio, agosto, settembre (nero)”. What do you remember about that period?

We'd just met, we were working with an Atari, ADATs, and mixing tracks straight on the desk. I loved it, I was very open-minded, almost naive, about music. Edo, on the other hand, found it a bit of a struggle to put up with me. I get it, though! In fact, afterwards we took a sabbatical period, after the release on Snowdonia/Mizmaze.

Were you by any chance also listening to Spring Heel Jack back then? I recall "glimpsing" them among your early work.

I know them, but I have to admit they never really blew me away.

Right after your debut, you released “Falling feathers”, immediately swerving toward a destructured sound, at times almost hermetic, I'd say. What caused that change of direction?

Let me start by saying that “Falling feathers” is one of the records of ours I love most. We made it when we'd started hanging out together again. In the meantime a computer had entered the picture, and technological upgrades in themselves lead you to work differently, and therefore to make different things. Sticking with the sounds of the first record felt like it would push us toward a somewhat industrial feel. Instead, we wanted to give space to silences, to the dialogue between instruments, to allusions. It's our most melodic record, one built on a fragile balance.

Anyway, revisiting the past feels a bit strange to me…

Why?

Um… I hadn't even realized I'd used the word "revisiting," which actually makes me think more of tidying things up, whereas the idea I wanted to express was reliving certain things you no longer think about. It makes me realize how incredibly long life is. It sets off a chain reaction

A full five years passed between the first record and “Falling feathers”… What did you do during that long break?

I recorded shortwave radio and anything else that made a sound. We put out some self-produced cassettes like Mongoholi Nasi and Uomi. We made a CD that we didn't want to release.

Why?

Because we weren't convinced by it. I'll let you in on a secret: we put it out much later. It's "When I Arrive, I Arrive" from 2012. When we released it, we didn't say it was actually an old work whose sound had been reworked.

With your latest work you veer towards an electronic sound made of submerged pulsations, disturbed frequencies, scattered noises and so on. In short, it seems like you want to account for those interstices where silence and sound blur together, where the unspoken is essential. In my opinion it's not among your best work, but it's a brave, moderately fascinating record…

Yes, we were interested in making music that was less imposing, more open and mysterious, leaving more space for the listener. We tried to produce unexpected encounters, working calmly over the long term, always using our own elements, but in a slightly different way. The time dimension is more expanded than our usual way of working. And there's always an evolution of sound, which here plays a bigger role in giving things a reason to be, and which also allowed us to stay more still. Well, I'll take the "brave."

Do you feel part of the Genoa scene, or do you prefer to stay apart, hidden, isolated?

I wouldn't know, we're a product of the city we live in. These days we know a lot of people, almost all my friends are into music, it doesn't matter if we sound like anyone else. I'd say everyone makes their own music. There's also the fact that we're not really into public relations, actually that's a side we should probably work on a bit. We rely a lot on Loris Zecchin of Solar Ipse.

What do you think of Italian music in recent years?

Look, for my taste, there are quite a few among the bands who started more or less like us around 2000. For me, the fathers of the scene are Starfuckers, who I find important because they made me understand that certain things can be done. Not for nothing does Alessandro Bocci take part as M16 on Niente Records' debut, with a track alongside Andrea Reali. The compilation features many Italian musicians who we think are hugely important for Italian music: Vonneumann, Lendormin from the great Cris X, Nihil Is Me, who is Andrea Giotto (Be Maledetto Now!, Squadra Omega, With Love), Placca (who are Ben Presto of Larsen Lombriki and Francesco Calandrino, who also appears on two other tracks), then Renato Ciunfrini, a talented longtime experimenter, A Spiral, now splintered into a thousand offshoots and disguises, Luca Sigurtà's Harshcore, Pentliczek, an excellent bassist, composer and improviser (a special person, in close contact with Stefano Giust, a musician of great openness, the mind behind Setola di Maiale — his countless releases attest to the quality of an Italian scene that's also free and imaginative); and then, Jealousy Party! A personal, truly original band, in their music as in all their forms of expression. And I'll stop there.

How does one of your tracks usually come about?

We usually decide on a method to apply to the production and recording of each track, we set some boundaries, as Edo puts it. It changes every time, sometimes radically, sometimes less so — we might play and record together or separately, we might use microphones or feed the tracks straight into the mixer… So it's different every time. And there's also the mood that permeates us in that particular period, which is never the same.

Many people, talking about your music, have brought up the Dadaist movement… Do you think that's a stretch?

Answer 1: Well, yes, somewhat. I really love Satie, including the book that collects all his little notes, "quaderni di un mammifero." I like Dada, the Situationists and Ulrike Meinhof, all those brave people move me.

Answer 2: Well, sometimes people link things to Dadaism almost to set them aside a little, it frees you from the burden of really getting into it. But it's true, I can't say we have nothing to do with non-Dadaism, I'd rather say altruism, but as a tendency, as in "I'll tell you later."

A term I've often used to talk about your music is "dissociation"…

Yes, I've always found it fitting. There's a clash of meaning from which things are born. Opposing elements are used to create something different, or unexpected. Well, I don't know how to put it better, I feel like I'm being a bit convoluted…

Let's talk about the Mongoholi Nasi project. The name is inspired, I imagine, by the pseudonym Stefano Tamburini used for one of his musical experiments…

Yes, the name is a tribute to Tamburini and his hoax. Mongo is more of a solo project of mine; Edo lends a hand with mixing and post-production. Usually there's a starting idea, and I keep the same constraints for all the tracks. It's a project that helps me deal with the fear of ending up destitute.

You also founded your own label, Niente Records.

We wanted to free ourselves from other people's needs, do something on our own and involve other projects we were connected to. At the start there was this idea of not putting anything written on the CD packaging, just "Niente Records" and vol. x. At first we also put out CDs by other acts, besides the open collaboration on the first CD. We released records by R.U.G.H.E. and Fvrtvr.

Did this need come from previous "disappointments"?

No, but there was a desire to decide for ourselves, even when it came to release timing. Also, putting a record out through a label that does this for a living has its advantages.

And how did you end up making a record for Solar Ipse?

We already knew Loris (Zecchin; ed.), I think it was just a matter of timing — at other times our schedules didn't line up, but this time it worked out. We're not hardliners when it comes to Niente Records.

What should we expect from a St.ride concert?

Generally speaking, we play material from the CDs we've just finished. In this case, the tracks were performed and composed specifically to be played live, maybe with the addition of some idea that came to us along the way. We'll have three synths and a tape recorder, plus a CD player and related effects, ah… and a pipe. Truth is, we're keen to take our racket out on the road a bit.

Sooner or later you'll end up at Sanremo, anyway…

Yeeeah, it'd be great to go play the freak show! You could do some crazy stuff with an orchestra…

Joking aside, to wrap up, can you tell us what your biggest musical dream is?

To make something beautiful. Something that does good for whoever's listening. I'd like to write the theme song for the start of a different world. But for now, I don't know, maybe I've still got one foot too firmly in the 1900s.

Ride the wave of great music

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