Q&A-001: "NOTHING TRUTHFUL ESCAPES OUR BORDERS" - an interview with Giacomo Stefanini (Kobra, Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni, Occult Punk Gang)
+++ A new interview from Milano to Sydney for 2022 ___
This interview with Giacomo Stefanini is the first new interview posted to this substack, which until now has been a pseudo-nostalgic traipse through personal writing archives; it's nice to pull my head out of my arse for once! Giacomo plays bass in the Milano punk band Kobra, is a member of the Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni collective (who have released a number of short run cassette tapes of contemporary Milano underground bands), and was previously a member of Occult Punk Gang, another Milano collective similar in spirit to Sentiero that ran up until 2020. I got to know Giacomo when he signed up to the Barely Human subscription service in 2021, posting him home-made zines, cassette tapes and t-shirts in irregular intervals, and emailing him prior to heading over to Italy for a research trip for a novel I'm working on. Giacomo rules ok? It's hard for me to not get carried away with it all, but meeting Giacomo and his friends in Milano was an all-time highlight, and I highly recommend poking around the Sentiero bandcamp to catch up on what they've been doing in Italy. This Q&A was carried out via email because I got too drunk on Moretti longnecks to record anything when we were in the same city. Divertiti!
Intro to Giacomo: DIY Milano, Occult Punk Gang, Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni
Max: So I emailed you a few months back because I had your address on a Barely Human mailing list, and I wanted to take a shortcut on some research I'm doing on northern Italian punk and hardcore. Your reply was really helpful, and getting to hang out in Milano was nuts: I had the best time and I loved the pockets of the city you showed me. This whole interview is based on what we were rambling about as you showed me around, but for the readers, can you tell me more about Milano punk/DIY and how you discovered it?
Giacomo: Before I moved to Milano, in my teens and twenties, I and everyone else around me thought Milano sucked. A lot of it was prejudice, being country boys and girls we all thought Milano people were poseurs and rich assholes (Milano has—or had—a reputation for rich assholes, see Berlusconi). Also, being a big city (for Italy), there isn’t a real push to turn to the outside for input—you have everything you need right here: touring bands, local bands, venues, crowds—so we didn’t even really know Milanese punks, and if we did, we didn’t like the way they talked.
I’ll spare you the autobiographical details, but in early 2015 I ended up at a show at COA T28 in Milano. Actually an Australian band was playing—Prag. A few months later, again at T28, I saw Dawn Of Humans. Those shows and a job offer prompted me to move to Milano, and the first thing I did was to find out who was putting on these awesome shows. And that’s how I became a part of it.
To answer the “more about Milano punk/DIY” part of the question without going on for pages, I’ll try to summarise it in a few key points. It has a great eye on what’s happening outside of Italy (unfortunately, less on what’s happening in other cities in Italy). It doesn’t have a particularly sectarian attitude: psychedelic longhairs, crusty punks, skinny-panted indie rockers, grindcore freaks, speed-addled ravers, artsy noisers, skinheaded meatheads all hang out and collaborate. It is fueled and housed and sustained by Centri Sociali Occupati and the people who run them. I can’t stress enough how important these places are and how much they are missed in other parts of Italy and the world.
It's been really refreshing listening through the Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni catalogue. In terms of style and genre, everything is very different, but I know that between you all there's a kind of united ethos, and in listening there's definitely a thread running through it, though I wouldn't know how to describe it. How did Sentiero come together as a collective, and how did you settle on an idea that is both diverse and expansive, but also feels like it has a unified vision?
Occult Punk Gang was a punk collective that emerged in 2016 and broke up in 2020. During that time, it enjoyed and contributed to a fantastic season of Milano punk (check out the documentary Uragano Negli Occhi - Uno sguardo sulla Milano punk 2015-2020 for a closer look, it comes with English subtitles).
After the end of OPG, in the middle of the 2020 pandemic, five of the many ex-members of the collective got together to start something new. It was a time riddled with fear and with the temptation of just giving up and giving in: just stay home, work your 9 to 5, watch Netflix and you’re lucky you’re in Italy because you can eat yourself to death with gusto. A need was felt to leave some of the darkness and negativity behind and to build something to keep the flame alive, so to speak. That’s Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni, “Future Path Self-Productions”. The vision of the label/collective was to make anything: tapes, zines, books, posters—as long as we did it ourselves and it pushed our vision of peace and it helped people like us to feel less alone. A stylistic point of reference is classic 80s Italian hardcore punk—the naïveté, the refusal to play by the rules of the music business, the determination to find your own alternative to what authorities and institutions peddle as “purpose”, the sense of community… you know, just DIY. The fact that the sound expanded beyond the hardcore punk realm with releases like TV Dust’s Beep, Anno Omega’s Magia, or Porta d’Oro’s Libero Pensatore / Porta d’Oro is just a reflection of our diverse local scene—after all, two of the three projects I just mentioned were made by members of the Sentiero Futuro collective! I think the spirit that keeps it all together is just apparent throughout.
Occult Punk Gang and Sentiero are both collective label efforts, which I find really inspiring. I know they’re not the only lables in the world who operate in that way, but in Australia (or the anglosphere more broadly maybe), the record label as an individual's pet project seems a lot more common. And since burn out is so real, these things can die so easy. When I ran Meatspin [a now abandoned/dormant DIY label], it was really exciting at first, but I just dumped everything on a credit card which blew out; the bank had to talk me out of filing for bankruptcy in 2019! Where do you think these disparate strategies come from?
I think it’s just cultural differences. The ex-British colonies have a lot more “entrepreneurial” genes in their DNA, so you go about your passions (which are passions, I’m not saying you're a heartless capitalist pig—but a lot of the people in power in the history of your countries were!) in a business-like manner. Also, your approach to Meatspin was the approach of an independent record label. Our approach to Sentiero Futuro is more akin to a sort of goofy and sloppy anarchist clandestine group meets a circle of friends who fuck around together. It’s like a punk version of I Soliti Ignoti by Mario Monicelli.
A part of us would really love to be a real record label. Another part of us really forgets to go to the post office, never bothered to figure out how to print the download codes off Bandcamp, would rather sell out a pressing of 20 tapes in person at shows than hawk them on social media, send them off to distributors, make promo copies for fanzines and stuff… we’re just not organised, so doing it as a group makes sure that somebody will pick up the slack here and there and make each other feel accountable.
This is wise. You are all very wise!
Venue and Autonomy: Space + Centri Sociali
We spoke a bit about Sydney and Australia's trouble with being able to maintain warehouse and DIY spaces with the regulatory environment here: spaces often shut down or restricted by council and/or cop. You echoed something I'd thought but never really said out loud, that the moment you start dealing with councils, landlords, and so on: you lose. In other words, you give away your autonomy. Can you expand on that?
My idea is that if you’re running a space that caters to a very niche demo it’s almost impossible to find the money to do things by the books. Security, regulations, taxes, are a rich person’s game. Squats are illegal by definition, their very existence is a breach of the law. But it isn’t a tax-dodging scam or anything like that, it’s just a peaceful way of protesting a system that doesn’t allow self-determination for certain segments of the population. Their strictly political nature allows them to not get immediately bulldozed by the authorities: they enjoy a sort of immunity (until they don’t: sadly, evictions happen all the time) that’s in a way similar to what a religious institution might have. They serve a purpose in the community, help a lot of people and allow the police to go “yeah, we know where the anarchists are” in case they need a scapegoat for something.
Our music and ethics align: like squats, the very existence of DIY punk is illegal in a way. It’s certainly a negation of capitalism. It’s self produced, self distributed, self organised, without a fixed price (no one is denied entry ever)… how do you fit a fire marshal in that? Of course if you rat yourself out to the authorities by asking for permission to do your literal anarchist seditionist get-together you’re going to run into some hurdles. I know a lot of cities don’t have the privilege of a well rooted squat scene like Milano or Berlin, so people have to take the “legal” route; I’m not calling everybody a rat, I’m just saying that’s the logic behind doing everything outside of conventional venues and spaces.
Oh it’s ok, I have long made my peace with being a rat. The places you showed me in Milano were utopian from my point of view! They were incredible. I guess the reason I ask is that I've been struggling for a long time now with the search for autonomy in underground music or writing. Looking for the best way to find it, and if it's possible to have a sustainable space and community without needing to fold to capital in any of its forms…is hard. So I was stoked the moment you told me about the CSOA (Centro Sociale Occupato Autogestito) spaces across Italy. Can you tell us more about them and how they sit within say Milano society? I was so struck by the high fashion VS squat dichotomy across town!
I think I might have answered this partially in the previous answer. In my opinion, the CSOA are the most important pillars of Italian counter culture. The Milanese tradition of anarchist/antifascist culture was able to endure crisis and repression: as I’ve shown you, most of the Centri Sociali still active today have been there for over thirty years—in some cases, fifty. They had their ups and downs, and they shouldn’t be taken for granted, as for example a city like Bologna was stripped of its historical squats over the course of the last ten years to make way for blind and ill-fated speculation. As somebody who didn’t grow up with anything even similar to this, to be able to take in fifty years of history of anti-capitalist cultural activities while you’re sucking down cheap beer and pogoing with some 17 year-old skater does something to you. Makes you think: “This is viable. This is right.”
Milano has a wealth of different spaces: most have an integral part in the life of the neighbourhoods where they sit. Some contain a library, some have a soup kitchen, some host a farmers’ market, some host Italian lessons, some have a medical facility that helps people who have limited access to the national health system. They are not bars, not restaurants, not live venues. All are run through an assembly that is open to the public, where everyone is welcome to propose new activities, shows, workshops, whatever. The buildings are maintained by the occupants. Money gathered through public initiatives is invested in political activities, maintenance of the space, and more public initiatives.
Of course when I say they are “an integral part in the life of the neighbourhoods” I’m talking about the real human people that live there. Droids in advertisement, fashion and finance don’t count: they only exist in offices, high-end wineries and so-called “art spaces”. The rest of the time, they order stuff through apps. They sometimes manage to go on a safari of the squats in the event of a DIY art fair or a particularly well-promoted show that has a really captivating flyer and they find everything very cute and romantic and then they try to replicate it in their jobs and stick a price tag on it.
Speaking of high fashion, between 2012 and 2021 there was a very unorthodox and beautiful DIY space called Macao. Compared to the other squats it was very contemporary and very art-oriented, and also benefited from one of the most beautiful buildings you could squat: a gigantic Liberty-style ex-slaughterhouse with a huge hall surrounded by a balcony that looked like a 19th century ballroom. During one Milan fashion week a few years ago, they rented out the space to some brand for a fashion show. I don’t know the details, but I remember it being an issue in the DIY community. “They sold out,” etc. But what Macao did was they took the hefty sum they were paid to rent their space and donated it to the HDP, the pro-Kurdish antifascist movement that was fighting the repression of the Turkish government at the time. And then, unbeknownst to the brand and to everybody else, the day of the fashion show they unrolled this huge banner that covered half the front of the building that said: “Milano Fashion Week supports the resistance against Erdogan’s fascist government.” That was a hell of a coup de theatre.
Hell yes to giant-antifascist-banner-punk! What's the relationship between the CSOA venues and the more 'legitimate' venues you showed me in Milano?
There’s not a lot of crossover between what the legitimate venues do and the squats. I mean, my friends and I, being into a lot of different music, go to shows wherever, it’s not like if you have a license we don’t fuck with you. But when it comes to underground music and especially rock-adjacent music, COVID had a really big impact on a lot of venues that were forced to close.
COVID had a weird effect on Sydney venues, kind of the opposite in a way. Pre-pandemic, venues had been difficult to find that would allow for this kind of music in Sydney, but in part due to COVID recovery schemes, there are more pubs and bars willing to put music on than before. Though the booking of many of these spaces were monopolised by the one agency which makes it all feel very yuck and compromised. More shows is good: but being in an 'underground' band making money for a hospitality booking company is bad. Compromise at some level has just felt so necessary for the projects I've been a part of, which is difficult when these projects are in theory somewhat anti-capitalist. So seeing the CSOA spaces in Italy was special. I guess I just admire the long tradition of occupation in Italy, and think it's a history that's rarely discussed in the anglosphere. Hanging out at COA T28 (the walls painted with: ‘chi compra questa casa compra anche gli occupanti’; ‘if you buy this building, you buy its occupants’) was inspiring on the hand, but depressing on the other, that without that tradition in Australia, it's hard to replicate in a sustainable way (though efforts have of course been made!)
There’s a lot to be said about the “uncompromising” attitude of Centri Sociali: the pros and cons, the values, the struggle, the change they bring to Italian society have all been part of an ongoing debate for decades—so there’s no way I can give you a proper portrait of what they are and represent. I’ll speak from my point of privilege of a white middle class intellectual working man that hasn’t lived in a CS nor has ever been a political activist: even if their only purpose was to serve as an escape for young kids who want to rebel against their parents and live outside of society for some time, it would still be a learning experience about mutual help. And they are so much more than that.
What you said about venues in Sydney is the oldest trick of capitalism: the product is good—it helps to spread art, and discourse, and culture, and community to a certain extent. But the good part is rendered sour by the bad part, which is: ultimately, the end goal will always be profit. And if profit, for any reason, wasn’t there, the whole thing would come crashing down. And the community, the art, the discourse would follow suit.
A cool thing we have in Italy that may not be a thing in Australia is the non-profit “private club” model. Once again I’m speaking about shit I don’t fully understand, but to the best of my knowledge, if you’re trying to start a cultural centre but you can’t afford to open a private business or you want to give it more of a “community” feeling, you can start a private club where people need to register to go. It’s very common. I have several membership cards from these places. That allows them to (I guess) enjoy some tax breaks and function as a sort of legal social space where the members can participate in the activities or just go and see shows or drink or eat or take knitting lessons or whatever they do in that place. Some are part of a national network so even though my membership card says “Milano” I can go to an affiliated club in Roma, Torino, Bologna or wherever. That’s compromise, I guess, even though some of my more hardline friends might tell you these clubs are liberal surrogates that help to keep the status quo instead of fighting against it.
Haha, that kind of model does exist here, but maybe on a slightly different level of liberal surrogacy! A lot of shows in the years when traditional venues weren't interested in a punk gig with thirty payers were places like bowling clubs, and cultural clubs run by diasporic communities. Though it's kind of inverted, in that us putting a show on in a place where an immigrant community spends their time has been criticised as a move of gentrification (which it is), but at its best, felt like a healthy melding of broader community interests (which makes me sound like a gentrifier.) I do feel like we could explore some kind of club model in Sydney, but rather than taking over an existing one, starting a new one…but that's a whole other conversation.
Back to culture! I loved talking to Mike from T28. His claim that the Milano punks invented the 'ladder match mosh' and not the Veneto punks killed me haha. In part because I had no idea what he was referring to...can you please explain the concept of the ladder mosh to the reader?
Haha! So COA T28 is a really small space and, like a lot of squats here, it doesn’t have a stage—the band just plays on the floor with everybody. So it’s hard to stage dive. Luckily Mike is a very resourceful person and T28 is constantly under renovation (being a squat since the 70s). One time, during a show, he just barged in the middle of the moshpit carrying a wooden ladder, opened it and very matter-of-factly placed it in front of the bass drum. Then proceeded to climb to the top and dove. I still remember the exact moment: Lucta was getting into “OCD”, their most powerful song, the guitar was feeding back, and the energy in the room was sky-high. I remember Mike’s bulky frame emerging over people’s heads and the excitement that rippled through the room. The ladder mosh later became legendary at the historic Sempre Peggio street show in via Gola during Le Cinque Giornate di Milano. Mike is a staple of the Milano underground. Everybody should check out his band The Seeker. Veneto punks don’t know what they’re talking about!
Milano and its relationship to Italy, nay the world!
Where do you think the Milano punk community differs from the other cities in Italy? I had a brief look around in Torino, Rome and Napoli at venues, squats... but it seemed harder to find (probably helped having you as a tour guide in Milano but still.) Is there anything about the city that creates that difference?
It’s a very hard question. Each city has its own history and current scene. Milano of course can count on the history of squats like Virus, Leoncavallo and Cox18, that were hubs of the punk scene during the ‘80s and ‘90s. But Torino has that too. I think what the current Milano scene has more than some other scenes is the influence of a lot of foreign bands coming to play shows here. It’s easier to reach if you’re coming from Europe than most cities because it’s smack dab in the middle of the North of Italy, only one hour away from the Swiss border. And it’s one of the most densely populated cities, so you can count on a good crowd if you come here. So we watched and were influenced by all kinds of great bands: Shit and Shine, Kaleidoscope, Impalers, Dawn of Humans, Pious Faults, Anxiety, S.H.I.T., etc. And the mix between the more artsy, trend-conscious, creative crowd and the more uncompromising punk crowd can probably breed good bands, good shows, good art.
It was sick to be able to watch Spirito di Lupo practice. Sure I felt like a dweeb sitting in the corner sucking on a Moretti and watching them play, but they're really special and I was stoked to hear them. I think they’re great, but more importantly: tell us why and how you coined the term 'inner-peace punk' to describe them.
Spirito di Lupo are my favourite current band! There’s something about them that just clicks with me—they’re also among my best friends so make of it whatever you want. Luca, the guitar player, was the original guitarist in Kobra and is a master of the hardcore punk riff. His playing is just, mwah! (chef’s kiss), the perfect representation of what classically-inspired Italian hardcore punk should sound like.
My idea of “inner-peace punk” comes from talking to them around the birth of the band, which more or less coincided with the birth of Sentiero Futuro. We were all going through or hopefully coming out of a period of internal turmoil, dealing with a lot of anxiety and conflict. When Francesco (singer in SDL and Kobra) explained to me his idea of Spirito Di Lupo, he was talking about trying to avoid the usual themes of a punk band and sing about things that really resonated with them: peace, self-awareness, self-love and love for nature and all beings. I immediately connected it to the non-violent approach of bands like Wretched and Crass, of course, but their first tracks (the 4 Canzoni tape) felt to me like they were permeated by a vague sense of spirituality, the poetry of some of the lines bringing to mind ancient Eastern philosophies. So when it was time to write down a few words for the release, I wanted to draw a connection with peace punk and at the same time underline this peculiarity: therefore, inner-peace punk.
It's been interesting for me to try and grapple with the meaning when I can only understand maybe one in twenty words of Italian, but it's important for English speakers to be constantly put in their place I think! You've talked about how the lyrics of Spirito di Lupo are so unique on a punk front (as above), which brings up something we discussed around the frame of reference of the limited access Italian-language punk has to the international underground. The ease of having English as a first language to access international networks is obviously taken for granted.
While I think there is no better time than now to reflect on the pros and cons of post-WWII American cultural imperialism, once again, I’m not a reliable source of information when it comes to such broad and crucial topics.
Music is a visceral thing. It’s way easier for us, the intellectually colonised post-Marshall Plan Southern Europeans, to relate to American lyrics than viceversa. See, even if we might have no experience of that New York City that “really has it all, oh yeah oh yeah”, we’ve certainly seen it in movies, tv shows, magazines, books and the internet, and we’ve fantasised about being there, being from there. But it’s completely different when it comes to Italy. Food, Vespas, La Dolce Vita—nothing truthful escapes our borders. I myself started listening to Italian-sung music later in life (around my mid-20s), and I used to think “so this cringey sensation is what Anglophones feel when they listen to Anglophone music?”—but now I know it isn’t. I just wasn’t used to it, so it made me feel uncomfortable, it was like a foreign language.
That cringe is interesting, and would take different forms. In the ‘50s, an Australian writer A.A. Phillips coined this term called the ‘cultural cringe’ which is related to that, though more related to British empire, with Australian’s forever seeing their own work as tacky or cringey or shit compared to, then, English work, I suppose now, the American cultural teat. Your NYC comment reminded me of being on tour in the States in 2018, and having someone explain to me that Donald Trump was President, as though we wouldn’t know who he was by virtue of living on an island in the souther hemisphere. Those kinds of assumptions are pretty funny to me, as irritating as NYC as 'centre of the universe' is to the rest of the world. Though there are so many variations to that, and it's interesting when it’s paralleled on some level in the global networks of niche music communities…like in a way, it’s what connects you and I together.
Of course! It would be foolish to charge against cultural imperialism tout court when it’s obviously a huge component in whatever it is that brings people like you and me together. At the same time, I think it’s interesting that people are becoming more and more open minded towards non-English music. Take the recent surge in popularity of the Gothenburg underground with bands like Treasury of Puppies, Monokultur, Enhet For Fri Musik. Or take Kobra and Golpe. Or Algara, Urin, Taqbir. These are bands that not only sing in a language that isn’t English, but also play in a distinctly un-American way—and yet sell records all over the world.
It's been noticeable over the past decade or so, and it's great to have these contributions in the broader soundscape. The anglocentric patterns of art or music within the anglosphere I feel isn't discussed so much because it poses difficult questions (as you allude to above), but I suppose there's a history of addressing this in diasporic communities in the anglosphere (e.g. Los Crudos opening up tour routes for hardcore bands through Latin America from Chicago). I’m really interested too in the contemporary trend in the US, UK, in Australia and elsewhere too, of bands with a front person who can sing in a non-English language—making that connection back through the generations to where their families came from, and making that a core part of their music. I feel like these bands, almost always, make a unique impact.
On this, you have way more insight than I do, being from a colony. Italy and its sorry excuse for an empire in the Mussolini days don’t share the history of segregation the ex-British empire has—we might be able to contextualise our own brand of melting pot in a few generations, provided the territory and people are still there. But I think the need to connect back to one’s roots has something to do with the clear historic loss the capitalist Western world has suffered over the current century. The stability we grew up on has been definitely compromised and people are striving towards self-determination to fill the void left by the dying Western identity. Despite the huge amount of information, the powerful public debate, and even such masterpieces as Straw Man Army and Kaleidoscope records, full decolonisation is far from achieved, of course, but the decline of the capitalist lifestyle, of its skewed idea of success, of justice, of balance is definitely going strong.
But global political tectonic shifts aside, you know, there’s nothing you can do to convince people of different backgrounds and from the opposite side of the world to listen to your music and relate—either they do or they don’t. Of course it’s been immensely gratifying to get emails from all corners of the world praising the work of Kobra. I know for a fact we deeply affected people in Russia, UK, Japan, USA, Brazil and that’s incredible, given our record had Italian lyrics and we provided no translation with it (sorry!). It is undeniable that, in the last 8-10 years, many non-English speaking bands have come up on the international scene and were able to tour the world. That helps to broaden people’s horizons. It’s also a fun thing to do while everything we know is destroyed by greed and power.
You work as an Italian-English translator in your day job, so I'm sure this is on your mind a lot...not just for niche music communities, but all art-forms, even down to political understanding. It was weird timing, but we were in Italy during the elections that brought Georgia Meloni's post-fascist bloc to power, and so much of the confused anglosphere response (e.g. Hillary Clinton praising Meloni as Italy's first Prime Ministerial woman) is maybe influenced (or easily obscured) by the language barrier. Does it make you feel isolated?
Yes, it does a bit. I’m also a compulsive narrator, as you and everyone reading this probably know by now, so it does frustrate me a bit that most of my “audience” (whether they’re listening to the music I help to make or read my ramblings on my—sadly abandoned—record review outlet GRRAWR) doesn’t get the context where I’m coming from. But am I sure I get the Australian context when I read your stuff? No, I’m not. Even though I probably spent more time listening to Deaf Wish, Low Life and X and watching Jim Jefferies comedy specials than you spent listening to Franco Battiato and watching Fantozzi, it doesn’t mean I’ll be able to place your next president on a political spectrum (but I advise you and your readers to read about Gaetano Bresci since you have a new king now).
What I’m trying to say, I guess, it’s a little bit of a delusion, this idea that people far away, that also have a huge amount of historical privilege, will genuinely understand and respect something so irrelevant to them as whatever is happening in Italy. How would they do that? I’m not talking about Hillary Clinton, who has her reasons to support Meloni. (My smartfuck political analyst friend Mattia Salvia, who has recently released his first book about the age of chaos and turmoil we’re living, wrote a very insightful essay about about the relationship between neofascism and liberalism and how the latter employs the former when it feels threatened—in this case, by the power, money and influence accrued by the post-colonial world.) On one hand you have to make yourself understandable by people all over the world as a DIY artist who can’t count on a sizeable audience in their own country (and who is naturally drawn to communicate with a community that is, far more than other subcultures, worldwide); on the other, it is vital for them to be fully themselves and self-determined. It’s a hard balance to keep in such a chaotic era.
Ways forward: Punk in Pandemic
I think probably the funniest part about catching up with you in Milano was that it felt like I was meeting the Italian version of myself: down to being like the exact same height and wearing the same clothes. Not so different after all! Both of us at the end were talking a bit about wanting to get more involved in helping with our city's music communities, but I'm kind of lost as to what to do now. Starting a new band, re-forming an old one, maybe joining another one, onwards and sidewards!
I have resorted to referring to you as “my Australian twin”.
It’s been hard for me to get back after the pandemic and the end of Occult Punk Gang. I tried setting up a few shows and the ones I could do were a lot of fun, but for some reason the setting up part feels so stressful. I’m having a hard time taking on more promoting “work” and often feel disconnected. On the other hand, I feel pretty good about playing. We’re almost done with the second Kobra record, I finally caved in and agreed to play live as Porta d’Oro and I’m playing with a couple of friends in a new still nameless band that’s taking me out of my comfort zone a bit, which is good (even though I often joke that I don’t have a comfort zone because I’m never comfortable). I guess things just need to happen naturally.
The other night I couldn’t sleep, and was just staring at the ceiling trying to figure out how to extract like thirty grand out of some Australian government funding scheme to fly out Kobra, Spirito di Lupo, etc in a Sentiero Futuro showcase haha. But man, I couldn't even manage to squeeze a $5k grant for a legitimate research trip to Italy, even with you writing a support letter! But this is why, I guess (to go full circle), being dependent on an external structure is flawed from the get go. And, well, the notion of government supporting underground/punk music is so inherently flawed I wouldn't know where to begin on chastising myself for even having the idea.
Hahaha! Hey listen, we can come one band at a time, don’t sweat it. Get a bunch of friends together, make a few fundraising dinners and DJ sets… maybe we can make t-shirts with excerpts from this interview, do you reckon they’ll sell? We could make a logo with our faces that said “the intercontinental twins”. Please don’t get the government involved. We don’t like them and they don’t like us.
Hahah it makes us sound like a wrestling tag team! How is Milano looking going into 2023? You said in an email there's a Sentiero Futuro party coming up?
I’ve seen a lot of very young new people at punk shows lately, and that fills me with joy. What we said to everybody that came to us mourning the death of OPG was, you know, it’s so easy to do, anybody can do it. We kept it going for years, it was the best thing ever, and we put so little effort into it, we were so disorganised, purely fueled by enthusiasm and mutual help. With an infrastructure so incredible as the one we have here with the squats and everything, why wouldn’t you do it? Especially if you’re young and can still do speed without hating yourself for days.
Next Milano things are without a doubt the Porta d’Oro show supporting Lametia and Mira/FC on 28 October at Circolo IAM (which is one of those non-profit legal community spaces I talked about earlier) and the Sentiero Futuro party on 31 October at Villa Vegan Squat with Algara from Spain, Spirito Di Lupo (homecoming party after their UK tour), Eterno Ritorno from Veneto, Narkan (first show! The youngest most promising band in Milano) and Bad Plug from Milano. And then some time in the next few months there’s gonna be the release of the debut Spirito Di Lupo LP, a new Kobra LP, and hopefully more shows, more Sentiero Futuro releases.
Hey readers, if you ever find yourself in Milano on a Friday, come have dinner and beers at T28. Chances are you’re gonna find us there doing punk karaoke and being goofballs. It’s a good time.
Do what Giacomo says, Milano rules! Thanks Giacomo, please say hi to all your friends who I met, I should have taken names and email addresses but I look forward to coming back and rambling with you some more!
+++other updates___
___ this substack picked up a few paid subscriptions ($5 a month, $50 a year) over the last couple weeks, thanks to those who threw something into the hat! i immediately felt guilty about it though, so i’m going to change the paid ‘newsletter’ subscription back into the barely human project subscription service (optional, not compulsory). so if you’re within australia (due to to po$tage) and you’re paying dosh, i’ll post you out any new BH zines/cassettes that come up through 2023 (plus any back catalogue you’d like.) i’ll email those who signed on in a tick, and you can always email or DM to get these things outright :)