Marco Passarani
Marco Passarani was there when Rome switched from disco to acid house, and even played his own small part in the transition as a radio DJ. Since then, he’s been immersed in the scene, running labels, making his music and DJing all over.
In his lecture at the 2008 Red Bull Music Academy, he talks dance music in the Italian capital, the ups and downs of running a label, how to avoid being messed around by the majors and what to do in the age of collapsing sales.
Hosted by Gerd Janson He has been part of the Red Bull Music Academy for quite a while, but
surprisingly enough he’s never been on the couch before now. He knows a thing
or two about Rome, techno and video games, how to run a collective called
Final Frontier, how to deal with minor and major labels and how to produce a record. So please, give Marco Passarani from Rome a very warm welcome. [Applause] Marco Passarani Grazie. Gerd Janson There’s this other thing you’re an expert on – pasta. So how do you do it? Do
you put olive oil in the water? Marco Passarani No, but some people do, it doesn’t matter. As long as you make carbonara
without cream and just eggs, it works. Gerd Janson And butter? Marco Passarani No way. The quality of the water is quite important as well. That’s why when
you go to Naples, places like that, where they have a specific kind of water, it turns out better. Gerd Janson So when you go to other cities, do you take your own water with you? Marco Passarani Ideally I would, but it doesn’t really work. Gerd Janson So do you buy some? Marco Passarani Maybe you put some extra stuff on top to hide the wrong flavor. Gerd Janson Ketchup? Marco Passarani Not really, maybe some pepper might work. Gerd Janson Now we know about pasta, but what about techno, Marco? Marco Passarani It’s a long story. I was lucky enough to be growing up in the end of ’88, so that’s when I really started doing things. I bought my turntables back then, but I was already DJing with friends when I was like 15, doing parties at school. I’ve been lucky enough to see the switch, coming from music you were just dancing to through to house and techno music. Gerd Janson So, before, you were just playing Prince records? Marco Passarani I was quite obsessed, just playing Prince and
Apollonia and Vanity and all this kind of stuff. I was quite a maniac. Gerd Janson Marco Passarani Totally, the Time and all
that kind of stuff. Gerd Janson But that was also pretty big in Detroit. Marco Passarani It seems like there’s a connection somehow. I didn’t know that at the time,
but then you start discovering more music and learning things, you see the
bigger picture. Like, thanks to I-f, the guy who played the other day, I see how Italo-disco was relevant to the start of house. We always thought it was related to disco, or in the case of techno that it was related
just to German electronic music like Kraftwerk and the British electro-pop and
things like that. Then we found some records, but Italo disco was totally
unknown in Italy, it was music for B-movies, for sexy comedies of the ’70s. Gerd Janson Sex comedies? Marco Passarani That’s a proper genre. Like you have police movies, called poliziotteschi,
like Roma A Mano Armata and Il Cittadino Si
Ribella, all these kind of dark police
movies from the suburbs of Rome. And you had this huge genre of sex comedies in
which Edwige Fenech, this French
actress, was always there playing the teacher in school and dropping the pen
and doing this [bends over]. And the music was always Italo-disco, so for us it was
really B-music – no one took it seriously. But after a few years, I remember
when Ferenc [I-f] first came over,
he was always playing this dark stuff like he played the other day, like
“Superman,” so the guys from the
squat get really excited, “I-f is coming, yeah, yeah!” And the first time he
came over he was playing Alexander Robotnick “Problemes D’Amour.” I remember
everyone was really shocked. There was a track we didn’t know as well, but it
had a 303 and some out-of-time
guitar on top of it that actually quite sucks in a way, but it’s beautiful
because of that. It has this pure sound that was really original. The 303
sounded a bit like an acid house 303, but that was ’83 or something, four-to-the-
floor kick drum. I think there’s quite a big connection between Italy and
techno. We just didn’t know at the beginning. Slowly, we went through all the
back catalogs of labels like
Discotto. Now we see
the picture. Gerd Janson Do you have the Robotnick track with you? Marco Passarani Actually, I don’t have it with me. Sorry. Gerd Janson How did you draw the picture from there on? Marco Passarani First of all, I have to say something about my background. Rome isn’t a city
that’s famous for music, it’s famous for monuments and the Vatican and stuff
like that. It was never a city where music was relevant. We didn’t have a rock
scene, a punk scene – that was all happening in Bologna, Milan or Florence. Gerd Janson Do you know why? Marco Passarani Not really. What I know is that we had a club called Much More and a DJ called
Faber Cuchetti, who was the
godfather of Rome DJs, he was the teacher for all of us. We were all listening
to his tapes and going there to dance. That was the only pure Roman thing. If
you look at disco in Italy, in Milan you had all these electronic Italo-disco
things. In Rome we had production that sounded American, people like Claudio Casalini. They were spending
too much money to do a 12”. I was talking to Claudio Donato, the guy behind Good Vibes, and he was telling me they
were spending 12 million Lira just to record one track in Rome because they
had to invite American artists to play guitar and do sessions. Basically, they
were really mad with the Milanese people, because they were doing it with
electronics and spending much less. So, the attitude was really funk, really
musical, and so was the Much More and that was the only thing happening. I
don’t know why there was no punk or rock scene, but when house and techno
became huge, Rome was probably the first city after London to have proper rave
parties. They were different, not like the travelers’ rave parties. But I
remember in 1990 going to Latino, which is 50km out of the city in this place
where everyone was dancing lisco, which is a typical dance for my
grandfather, and they were doing the rave party in the same place right
afterwards. We were standing in the line outside and we could see in through
the window these guys doing [imitates traditional dance], it was crazy, totally
different from England. It was so improvised and it was special for that,
since we didn’t have a big scene this became huge. It was our very first
movement and it was similar to London by happy accident, like a couple of
guys going to Unity and buying the right records and bringing them back to the city. Gerd Janson Who were these two guys? Marco Passarani Andrea Prezioso, Lory D, and also Mauro Tonino, who
unfortunately died recently. But Lori and Andrea did an amazing job bringing
in records you’d never heard. They started Rome’s first ever label, called
Sounds Never Seen, which
gave us the idea. It was, “What the fuck is this music?” Even right before
acid house was making it into a few clubs, I was getting tapes from other DJs and learning how to mix properly and I was inspired by the tapes. They sounded
different, new, like a revolution, and basically it was the acid house from
Chicago, the Trax stuff, Armando, Phuture, things we were talking about
the other day. Gerd Janson We talked about Armando and DJ Pierre, but he didn’t have anything
with him. Marco Passarani I can play you something now. This bassline here is one of the reasons why I’m
still making music. The first time I heard it I was, “Hmm, OK, I’m gonna do
this for the rest of my life, I can’t help it.” I still play this, I’m really
devoted to it. “Downfall” by Armando is coming through the speakers. (music: Armando – “Downfall”) Gerd Janson So, this got you into making your own music? Marco Passarani It was clear from listening to this that I might be able to do this. I was
working in a record store, but I was taking care of the video games. It was
the last days of Commodore 64, and mainly Commodore Amiga, and whenever the
boss was out, the other guys and I had this little sampler and we’d try to do
something. The guys working with me were music freaks, they were introducing
me to all kinds of stuff from Kraftwerk to Brian Eno to David Sylvian and
Japan, all this kind of stuff. The guy liked how I was DJing and he said we
should try to do something together, mix a beat with Brian Eno and My Life
in the Bush Of Ghosts, that kind of stuff. It was obvious and predictable, but we
were kids fucking around. The software we were using, I don’t know if any of
you know it, it’s called Tracker, the kind of
software people used to make music for video games. It was a weird sequencer
that had a very specific way of cutting the samples that really worked. It was
amazing and whenever the boss was out of the store we’d be doing this all over
the afternoon. We didn’t give a shit about the customers. It was fun. Back then it was a
normal record store, one in the northeast of the city selling Eros
Ramazzotti, Michael Jackson and these kind of things. But, back then, you could
find amazing 12”s even there. It was a totally different world from now. In Italy it was
really bad, nothing like what you’d see in London or Cologne or Berlin. Back
then it was a bit better, so in this normal store in the north-east of the
city we had this stuff and we were sampling and trying to put things
together. Gerd Janson I guess, you won’t have anything from that period with you, video game music
made by you. Marco Passarani I never did any video game music. Gerd Janson No, I meant with the samples. Marco Passarani No, not back then, we did that later. But then we had the chance to play our
stuff to some guys from the local radio station, since techno was becoming the
phenomenon in Rome. There was this station, Radio Centro Suono, that did a
show on Saturday night called Radio Centro Rave, and within two months
everyone in the city was listening to this station. They also had a show from
2 to 4 PM, prime time in the afternoon, and back then we had this huge
commercial network from Milan called Radio DeeJay, and they used to have all
the listeners. In two months they lost them all, because in Rome something was
happening. It was the birth of a movement and everyone was into it, normal
people, weird people, people of all ages. You’d go to the parties and it was
such an amazing atmosphere, very special. Some of the guys came to our store
because they were living there, and I had the chance to give them a
mixtape and a couple of tracks I made with a computer. From there I started
being “the kid” of the radio station – they were playing my tracks in the
afternoon and my mix on the Saturday night, not in the relevant position of
the show, but since there were so many people listening to it, it helped to
speed up the process of getting into the groove. I started playing regularly
and got invited to a couple of rave parties. I remember at the first one
playing DHS, you remember the “House of God?” The guy was playing live, I
was one of the few to witness it, it was the night before Christmas and he
knew that “House of God” was huge in the techno scene. But he was coming from
new wave, it was a different environment for him. We were all kids dressed in
the hip-hop style for techno, that was the style back then. Gerd Janson What’s hip-hop style for techno? Marco Passarani Large pants and sneakers, it was mad. If you came to my place like that, I
wouldn’t let you in because it was boots and all black. It was such an early moment, even the producers who were quite famous were quite different from
what was happening back then. Because of the radio and the store, I managed to
get into this movement and started doing things. Gerd Janson And when you say movement, techno was the great utopian society for you? Marco Passarani Yes, it was the revolution, it was the future, it was progress, it was
changing my life and a lot of other peoples’ lives. There was a vision, especially because most
of the records coming out were mentioning science fiction, like Underground Resistance, they were
drawing a picture of the future somehow. The early Plus 8 stuff from Richie Hawtin when he was called Cybersonic or F.U.S.E., they were drawing some kind of vision and that was techno for us. It wasn’t just about the groove, it was about the vision of the future. I want
to play a track by Underground Resistance, not one of the most famous but it
really will give you an idea of the background and the vision about the
future. (music: Underground Resistance – unknown) I can assure you, back then, this was the future. You were coming from a normal
world. When this was happening at the big parties, it was, “What the hell is
this?” We were coming from clubs and suddenly seeing 5,000, 6,000 people jumping and hugging each other. It was a very “love” kind of thing, but with this kind of music. Gerd Janson And also with some other stuff, right? Marco Passarani Absolutely. Gerd Janson Do you ever get nostalgic listening to these records? Marco Passarani Yes, yes. Gerd Janson Because techno died in ’95, as someone said the other day. Marco Passarani Since I’ve known Ferenc well for many years, I understand what he said. But
it’s not true. Techno didn’t die, the music became wider, more producers,
different flavors. You have the original revolutions and different styles, and techno evolved somewhere else. Maybe, if you use the general meaning of
techno, people will misunderstand you. Clearly, the attitude was romantic. It was really coming from the heart, really pure. There was no idea of business, even though
this record did much better business-oriented than anything these days,
because the music was more popular, records were selling more. This was a very
romantic moment I think. But it’s different. Gerd Janson You know a thing or two about running your own business as well. Marco Passarani Do it yourself, again. It all started after the radio period, because there
was clearly some breakdown at some point. It went from small parties to huge
parties and promoters started to speculate on parties. They were promising
this act who wasn’t there, or they’d say it was a 70,000 watts soundsystem,
and it was five; things like this. So the movement went down. Me and my
business partner Andrea Benedetti decided to do
something. Also because there was only one record label in Rome, Sounds Never
Seen from Lory D, and there was Leo Anibaldi, who was really popular
and was releasing records for ACV. There
was this independent label giving you deals like a major label, fucking you
up, so you couldn’t earn one cent if you sold 999 copies, you had to sell
1,000, all this crap. Then they were hiding records during the days of the
statement. So, we built up our own structure. But I think I should quickly play
you a couple of Roman things that inspired us, a couple of tracks from Lory.
This is quite intense, a different kind of techno, before
gabba and hardcore, contemporary to the early Aphex Twin stuff. Lory was probably even earlier in tweaking all the
synths as much as possible to create this sonic invasion and devastation of
the speakers. He was famous for that – he was literally moving 8,000 people to
hear this. Listen, it’s pretty weird. Forget about funk for a minute,
there’s no funk. This album was so popular it came out on BMG, that’s how big
it was. (music: Lory D – unknown) (music: Leo Anibaldi – “Acid Perversion”) Marco Passarani And on and on like this. The thing they had in common was the use of the hi-
hats. There was this specific discussion in Rome about how to use the hi-hats.
They had to be from the 909, no
other drum machine, really distorted but lower in the mixing. He did it similar to Lory
but much more concrete. Gerd Janson It’s like the pasta. Marco Passarani Yeah, they’re specific things, but if you respect them, things turn out
better. Gerd Janson And what happened to all these guys? Marco Passarani Lory is back. He made some 300 tracks that were never released, amazing stuff,
unbelievable, but he’s really on a different planet. Leo went too deeply into
this Spiral Tribe thing. I don’t
know if you’ve heard of these communities called Spiral Tribe, but they were
the traveler’s communities, traveling Europe in vans, bringing the
soundsystem and throwing huge parties, like special acid live shows for 18
hours; really wild, in factories. Leo went into this and then disappeared and
then came back. It’s a different path. Me and Andrea decided, “Since no one
gives a shit, let’s do it ourselves.” We decided we should have our own office,
import some records we like, try to sell them to everyone. I did some records
before this, I did four records with Alan Oldham from Generator in Detroit. Back
then it wasn’t like now – you have MySpace and email – even making a phone
call was expensive. So, we thought we should have an office and do our own
stuff, and that’s how we began Final Frontier. We were using the money from
the record store in Rome called Remix, they used to sell lots of records. But
sometimes they were ordering too much, so they had lots of records that didn’t
sell. They’d say, “Hey guys, if you sell my records I can produce your own
label and put some money in there.” So we were just... [gestures putting
record on and picking up the phone] on the phone to every record store in
Italy trying to clear the overstock. Gerd Janson And did that work? Marco Passarani Erm, all the stuff we were selling, and at the time that they thought we were
crazy, is now popular [laughs]. It worked. It gave us a structure that
everyone knew, we did get in touch with different labels and expanded our
circle. Since we were selling our records we were talking to a distribution in
England and saying, “Can you sell a hundred copies of my record and we’ll take
50 of yours for Italy.” We were trading, but now it doesn’t work like that.
With the first Final Frontier records we were going to London to Fat Cat, there was Lee Grainge, the guy in the store I remember best,
and we were going in there very humble with the white label, “We have this,
can you listen to it? Maybe you want to buy some?” And they were calling us
back the week after asking for 75 copies. We were trading stuff and it was
really working. Without this, it wouldn’t have been possible to do the label
back then. We weren’t rich, we started with €200 in the bank account. We
needed someone to give us money; trading records, that was the deal. Slowly,
we were selling stuff to 30 stores, we had records that were more popular that
we couldn’t sell because we were too small, but we were reselling them to
another distributor, all the classic processes of underground distribution
back then. But because of this we managed to start Nature Records and Plasmek Records. Gerd Janson Maybe you have some examples. Marco Passarani I can play a track from Nature 001, which we sold mostly in Fat Cat and
RubADub in Glasgow, because they kept
ordering the record, because we didn’t have any distribution yet. It was clearly a
post-Aphex Twin moment,
post-µ-ziq, you remember with
Mike Paradinas? So,we were quite inspired, but I still like this track if I can find it somewhere
[looks on computer]. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to use your vinyl, I’m not
going to fuck it up… and this is 1993. (music: T.E.W. – “Pcania” / applause) Gerd Janson Sounds like a Shut Up And Dance record. Marco Passarani Hardcore was quite popular, thanks to Andrea Prezioso going to Rage in London and wanting to recreate that. We were into that kind of stuff. It was right after the techno and house thing, we were more into the English productions,
Aphex Twin and the Rephlex stuff. When we released this one, we got a fax from
Rephlex saying they were really supporting us, they loved our records. We were
excited. Whenever we got a fax we were like... [stares at imaginary fax
machine] because it was coming through so slowly. Gerd Janson Not like opening emails today. Marco Passarani It can be fun. You have to hide it, then you show it. The surprise effect is
still there. Gerd Janson So talking about all the English stuff, after this you went to IDM. Marco Passarani Yes, it became more and more complex, the Artificial Intelligence kind of dance music, or IDM, intelligent dance
music, if you want to call it that. Somehow in Rome went all in that direction, not just the
Aphex Twin and all the Warp Recordings stuff, it’s the biggest underground
stuff in Rome. It was huge, at some point we weren’t doing classic dance music
any more. I remember doing this party on a Wednesday night in a very small club
in about ’96 and there was a guy playing four-to-the-floor. We kicked him out
because it was never four-to-the-floor, it was broken, difficult, that was the
idea. It was working really nicely. Stuff like
Autechre are still really big. It’s
one of the places you’ll go and see 2,000 people dancing to it somehow. Gerd Janson Dancing to Autechre? Marco Passarani Yep, I’ll listen to my favorite, that was really influential for me. It’s
from LP5, which is
not one of the earliest, but it’s really amazing. (music: Autechre – “Arch Carrier”) Marco Passarani We don’t need to listen to it all, but this indicates what we were playing on
a Wednesday night and the club was packed. It was a small club, 200 people,
and they were dancing to this stuff. So, clearly, when we were doing our own
production it was getting closer to this. But we were moving back and forth
through different styles and we had an electro phase, thanks to records we were
selling like Dopplereffekt or
the earliest Anthony Rother,
they were really popular, or
Drexciya. Gerd Janson Who were Drexciya? Marco Passarani Drexciya were these alien forms coming from Detroit. Actually, no one really
knows. We know, but they were shrouded in mystery, but it was one of the best
electronic dance music projects ever. I have to play you this one, then we’ll go to more
things from my label and I’ll stop playing other people’s stuff, but I have to
play you this one, especially if you don’t know it. (music: Drexciya – unknown) This was the kind of stuff we were all playing, this was the music in our
club. Gerd Janson So you like a bit of melody. Marco Passarani Yes, of course. Gerd Janson Would you start a label or a distribution company today? Marco Passarani Today? No [laughs]. Clearly, this is something you can’t really tell,
because when you’re younger you’re really motivated and everything. But being a musician
or a producer, I would stick to making music and not get any pollution from the
business side of it. Nowadays, it’s really difficult, it changes every month,
there’s a different theory on how you should do it. Back then it was simple –
just press the record, send it to someone and something happens. Now, every
week something’s different. The distributor says we should do the vinyl first,
then the digital. Then it’s, “No, we should do the digital first, otherwise
people will put the tracks online and we won’t sell any digital.” It’s like
this every week, so if you have to do it, just keep in mind that it will kill
your creativity for a while, especially nowadays when the distributor can
fuck you up easily. Two years ago there was one distributor after
another going bankrupt, and there was a lack of money in the system. And it’s the labels
that suffer, they’re the ones that don’t get paid. So it’s difficult. But I’m
proud I’m still doing it, though clearly I’m doing it in waves – it’s like
riding a sinewave somehow, it’s going down and up. Sometimes you sell more,
sometimes you don’t sell at all, so you just keep it running somehow. Because
if you just do a record then disappear, it’s not a label. You have to create a
system, proper promotion and distribution system. You really need that –
there’s no way to do it by just dropping vinyl and selling a few copies. It
can work, of course, but it’s different, it’s quite complicated. Gerd Janson So, do you have any recommendations of a way to work around these problems? Marco Passarani Keep yourself updated and learn all the systems. Surely, I would say don’t
just do a digital label, because it doesn’t make sense. It seems like it’s a
virtual world. You think it’s out there, it’s available to everyone, so maybe I
can sell a lot. It’s not like that, unless you’ve made a very popular track
and spent money on promotion or someone was playing it and it became well-
known. If you’re doing a label, make sure first of all to raise your profile doing music for other
labels, so at least there is an amount of people that know you, and the moment
you have the label you can go to the distribution company and they will be
happy to work on your label because they know your name, and that they can
count on a certain number of people buying your records. We don’t need to do
this now, but if any of you are doing this label career and want to know a few names
and addresses to hook you up, I can give you some names. With just one person
you can sell to more stores, good ones, they can sell your tracks. This stuff
can help you, but as a general suggestion I would say make music for labels
that have been up and running longer and are more stable. They can help you
more if you’re struggling doing the label and doing the music. At some point
it doesn’t work, unless things go really well. But the reality is things might
not go really, really well. Why waste your talent just doing paperwork? Just
make music and let the labels do that job. Gerd Janson What’s your personal theory for why it’s not going well? Marco Passarani Since there are more and more producers, clearly there’s more music out
there. The more music is out there, the less you sell. Talking to stores and stuff, they
still sell the same number of records, but there are three times as many
titles. Clearly, there’s less space for new names and people tend to trust the
labels they know. It’s a difficult moment, it’s not easy, but at the same time
it’s democratic, you can make the track and send it to everyone in a second. But
it’s a more virtual satisfaction, it’s not really happening. It’s different than when you would give a record right in the hands of a DJ. Now the mailbox gets full
of promos and you don’t even manage to listen to all of them. So, now it’s less
visibility because of the huge number of producers, because now producing
records is easier. Back then we had to buy the drum machine and this and that,
and you couldn’t find the 909. Now it’s just software mostly, so it’s a bit
easier, a bit more accessible and it’s an amazingly democratic thing. But at
the same time it’s also a bigger ocean you’re swimming in, so it doesn’t make it easy. Gerd Janson Why did you say that starting a label means you must lose some of your
credibility? Marco Passarani No, creativity. Because if you’re running your own label, you have to deal
with stuff that has nothing to do with music. When you’re dealing with
promotion and selling and accounting, you forget about music for a few
days, sometimes even longer. Even if it’s good for your music it will take you off music for a while. Be careful about it, make music. If you’ve got a
talent, let people with different talents take care of that. But if you really
want to do it, then be ready to be a soldier because it’s a war. Gerd Janson So, what makes you keep doing it? Why not say you don’t care about business and just sell your stuff to other labels? Marco Passarani True, but I’ve been working for 15-17 years to build something. Now, maybe the
reality is different but I still want to do it. Maybe I’ll do it for a while,
then switch to the studio for six months and make music. I still love to get the record, I mean, even though I play with Serato Scratch I still love to
press records. It’s addictive, you just cannot stop it. Gerd Janson How does it come together then if you’re playing Serato? Marco Passarani I still buy records. The fact I’m playing Serato doesn’t mean I don’t like
records any more. But it’s something I do because I can edit tracks on the fly,
not be breaking my back carrying records. I’ve been doing it for 17 years, I’m
allowed to play Serato Scratch [laughs]. Gerd Janson You’ve also worked with different labels throughout your career. Marco Passarani Yes, working with labels bigger than yours can help you with your own label.
I’ve worked with labels like Generator,
Skam, and the latest one is
Peacefrog. I did an album
with them three or four years ago, and it helped sell other records on our
label, we’ve just been throwing out old stock. It worked. Gerd Janson Proof of your theory, then? Marco Passarani Yeah, that’s quite evident because they can reach a bigger audience so your
name gets around more and the distributor might pay more attention to your label as well. Gerd Janson Do you have something from that? Marco Passarani I’ll play you the track that was the most popular. It was just a hidden one on the album, but the label released it as a 12”. Gerd Janson And it was a kind of hip-house? Marco Passarani Not really. It is, if I find it… [looks through computer]… Gerd Janson If you had records, you’d have covers. Marco Passarani I have some pictures here too… (music: Marco Passarani – “I House U” / applause) Gerd Janson So this is you with a vocoder? Marco Passarani Not really, it’s clearly a mash-up. I didn’t mean to release it, but that’s
the English way of doing it and I did it, the bootleg kind of thing. Gerd Janson You’ve also had some negative experiences with other labels, right? Marco Passarani Negative in a way and positive in another. You’re talking about the Jolly Music experience, two guys I’ve
been working with for many years,
Mario [Pierro] and Francesco [de Bellis], who are quite
well known as Jolly Music. That was a project we did on Nature, my main label, and at some
point we were selling quite well, really amazing press, blah, blah, blah. Gerd Janson What was the inspiration? Marco Passarani Music coming from the flea market; fucked-up records, records you take from
the back of toy dolls and trying to put them on a turntable, a big collage of
weird things and Italian soundtracks, all this Umiliani, Piccioni kind of thing. The
record was some kind of masterpiece for us, but really arty somehow. But at some
point, someone who was thinking about money and not art called us, this guy
from EMI in the UK, and they wanted to license the record. We went through the
process and we were shocked, this could set us up for life and it was a very,
very good deal. But when you’re independent you don’t know that much about the
major-label system, so you have to spend lots of money on lawyers, do all this
stuff that is new to you. You drop the distribution work, because you think,
“This is it, I can just work on this project.” Then, at the end, you can have
this major label spending more than £100,000 on the record, but it doesn’t
come out. It’s an experience that was quite common in those years when the
majors were showing signs of weakness, during 1999 to 2002, the moment when
they were really going down. We signed to EMI, they sold us to Sony and we
recorded with the sound engineer for the Chemical Brothers and all this stuff. Suddenly, the record is only seventh in the Buzz chart, that’s not enough.
Basically, it was just proof that this business doesn’t work anymore. Seventh
in the Buzz chart means maybe 50,000 copies to 100,000 copies, but to a major that’s
peanuts, so they didn’t give a fuck. It was an amazing experience for us, like
going to school to see how the music business works. Afterwards, we managed to
get the lessons and we learnt a lot. The disaster of the record not coming out
killed us for a while, but then things got better. We resisted with quality
and hard work, things go on anyway. Despite that bad experience we still got
some money, we built a studio, now we have a nice studio with a nice office.
Without the bad experience, we wouldn’t have that. And Pigna, the other
label we did, we did it because we were facing so many troubles with the Jolly
Music thing. Imagine taking three guys from the underground and putting them
in the mainstream clubs – we didn’t fit, we weren’t playing four-to-the-floor
house like they wanted the whole time. So it was a nightmare for us,
especially for Mario and Francesco, the main guys in the project. But being
big underground means learning how to move and go down, and rise up again and
go down. That’s what we do for a living. I’m 35, I’m still here. So fuck Sony, we’re still here. Gerd Janson So it’s like Melvin Van Peebles said, “It doesn’t matter how often you go down, it’s how
often you get back up again?” Marco Passarani And being down is part of the game, it’s when you probably make your best
music because you’re upset. If this is what you do 24 hours a day, you need
lots of energy, you need to be really motivated. When something bad happens you need to push hard to come back. You have to go up and believe in it. You said the Jolly Music
thing was negative, but when you think about it we were lucky. We got good
money, we built a studio, got an office, a kitchen. I couldn’t do that before,
just selling 1,000 records. We were playing in the house with the neighbor
[gestures banging on the wall], now we have a professional studio and we
learnt how to do the business. We saw the depressing side of it, and behind the
success is bullshit. Most of the time, the big companies force radio to play
certain things. They literally force journalists to write certain stuff. We didn’t
force anyone but we understood, if you have professional press agents, it can
help a good record. It means it’s possible to have it reviewed in a nice
magazine, get a nice article, an interview. So, you learn how the business
goes, and that’s thanks to the Sony and EMI failure. Gerd Janson But even with a lawyer you couldn’t keep control of your own project? Marco Passarani Listen, I gave my lawyer €20,000 because there was a present stage of the
contract. If I wanted to regain control, I’d have to pay that money again, get
my lawyer to talk to these people. It will take ages, they will kill you. “Fuck
it, keep the record forever, we’ll make another one.” On the contract, it says
Jolly Music, so we’ll make Jolie Musique, we’ll find a way around it. If a
major label approaches me again in the future, “Give me more.” It’s really
worth getting lots of money, otherwise it’s not worth it. Stick with the
independent label and go around and make music. These people are selling smoke
most of the time. Gerd Janson Shall we listen to some Jolly Music? Marco Passarani Unfortunately, I don’t have any of the original version that we put out on
Nature, but I have one of the tracks we re-did in the Sony studio with the
amazing Steve Dub,
the sound engineer of the Chemical Brothers. That was the best experience
because he told us how to mix things properly. OK, he has different machines, but… (music: Jolly Music feat. Erlend Øye – “Talco Uno” / applause) Marco Passarani Mario and Francesco are two amazing musicians. I was so lucky to be working
with them, especially when I think that the first track I liked came through
backwards on the tape by mistake. I called them and said, “I like this. What
is it?” But the tape was playing backwards. It’s a long story, a 15-year love
relationship with them. Gerd Janson You’re still working with them? Marco Passarani Yes, but under different names. Mario lives in Sweden now, Francesco is still
in Rome. Gerd Janson But you were also Raiders Of The Lost ARP]? Marco Passarani That was Mario alone. I helped with the mixing and finalizing the tracks, but
Raiders was just Mario. Gerd Janson You mentioned you learned how to properly mix down a track in that studio in London. Marco Passarani I saw how the big guys do it, but it’s not really our field. We spent all our
money buying synthesizers in our life, we never bought the compressors. That
was a big mistake actually. We always went, “We have some extra money, let’s buy a
Moog, let’s buy another Moog, let’s buy an
MS-20, an MS-10.” We still have a lot to
learn about mixing. Not that we care that much, to be honest. We love the
synthesizers, that’s what we do. Gerd Janson If it feels right, it sounds right. And if you were buying a compressor, what
would you buy? Marco Passarani I don’t know, I’d send Patrick Pulsinger an
email saying, “Hey Patrick, what should we buy?” Gerd Janson And you’d trust him? Marco Passarani I believe that music is a bit like the movies, everyone has to do his own job.
You have to know how to do a bit of everything, especially now that
everything’s accessible, a good mixing desk, whatever. But I still believe
everyone has a role and it has to be respected. Gerd Janson So, you don’t master your own tracks. Marco Passarani If I can do it with someone else who has more skills than me, then I’ll do it
like that. Gerd Janson Maybe we should open it up to questions. Marco Passarani Yes, especially if it’s about labels, you want to know how to open an invoice,
get money back from the distributor [laughs]. Gerd Janson How to be prevented from becoming a pop star… They are scared to ask
you. Is your experience with the Academy something that helped you? Marco Passarani Sure, it showed my limits when I came here. When you stick with the same
people all the time, you’re in a safe place, you know what to do, where you
have to go. When you go to a place with 30 creative people like this – and
last year and the year before – who are so talented, you have to consider differently what
you do. I saw my limits and decided to improve, and put more time into
my music and spend less time on the business, put the energy into there, with
you and with other people too. Gerd Janson So, are there any questions? Audience member What are the secrets to the work/life balance? You’ve got a business head and
you’ve got a studio junkie head… Marco Passarani I still don’t know. I just know whenever I do the business part of it, the
creativity always gets fucked. Even if my accountant tells me to bring the invoices
in – because doing the label you always have more stuff than if it was just
yourself – whenever I do this stuff, and then try to make music, even if it’s
the day after, it doesn’t work. You have to wait a little bit and get into the
studio again and switch. Maybe the brain works differently. It’s difficult,
you have to balance, but the answer is sometimes to not give a fuck about the
business. Take care of it later. But, then, it’s not really working. Audience member Are you your own boss, do you have people around you? Marco Passarani It’s just me. I’m surrounded by amazing guys but they’re useless. They’re
amazing, inspiring, fun and creative, but they’ve never been interested in the
business thing. So, it’s do it yourself by all means. Sometimes I feel really
terrible about it. Gerd Janson So, they’d rather go to the beach than spend an afternoon in the office? Marco Passarani Yes, but that’s what I did this summer, I reacted to this situation like that.
I just said, “OK, for three months we’ll just do that.” Audience member Three questions: what is it about Rome that something like that could happen
17 years ago, and how come such an incredible energy came up through such
unusual music? Also, what’s your favorite Italian B-movie horror flick and
why’s your coffee so good? Marco Passarani Nothing was happening there musically, so at some point something had to
happen. It was hidden underground and had to come out. We always ask ourselves
why it was so dark. Rome is beautiful, the weather is beautiful, food is
amazing, monuments, history, everything is beautiful. It seems like the music
is dark as a reaction, an answer to all this beauty. The horror movie Incuba Sulla Città Contaminata,
you have zombies coming out of the plane with guns, it’s amazing. There’s this
scene with the plane and there are zombies coming out for about 20 minutes. There must be about a million zombies on that plane. It’s by Umberto Lenzi, Dario Argento’s partner. Gerd Janson And the coffee? Marco Passarani The water. Audience member It’s not the Italian coffee machines? Marco Passarani Oh, you have those everywhere. It’s the water. Participant But you keep them cleaner. Marco Passarani No, you never clean it, never wash it. Gerd Janson You never turn it off, right? Marco Passarani No, never. Participant You talked about the Spiral Tribe. Have you been in touch with it recently? Marco Passarani I was in touch with them in 1995-’96, all the Network 23 things. I heard some of them are
still in Italy and every now and then they do parties in the mountains; 10,000
people for three days, things like that. But I think they have problems with
the local scenes, because of stories you may know, that they go into cities
and mess around with the wrong people. They get kicked out of the city, kicked
out of Naples, and they’re in hiding now. I don’t know if there’s a Spiral
Tribe collective still alive. Participant What’s the techno scene like now in Rome? Marco Passarani At the moment it’s big. It was quiet for a while, but then we had this New
Year’s Eve party that became really famous called Amore, 40,000 people dancing
to Richie [Hawtin] and
Ricardo [Villalobos] and blah, blah,
blah. It’s mostly minimal, or what they call minimal, they just use the name
now. It’s quite big, not many clubs, but it’s everywhere, even clubs we
couldn’t even enter before, because the music was so different. It’s much wider
now, even though the scene isn’t really happy any more. But there are more
customers, so it’s alive. But I’m out of it. I just live in Rome, sleep and
eat, that’s it. Participant What about the IDM scene? Marco Passarani In Rome it’s kind of gone. We had a really big scene, where, if we had someone
from Warp, 2-3,000 people would show up. Even if we did the guys like
Schematic from Miami, everyone was
showing up. At the Dissonanze festival they
always had this room where they were mainly doing this stuff, but now it’s
just a special guest, maybe a couple of artists in the whole night. It’s not
there any more, unfortunately. It’s a bit like in the record business, all this
stuff suddenly went down. Audience member You run your own independent label. Now, we have all this music downloading and
piracy. Even for the major labels, it’s hard to make money out of sales now.
How do you manage to get your label working? Marco Passarani I do a party when I need to break even. Most of the time, you lose money, so I have to DJ and put the money into the label. It’s been a real struggle this last year-and-a-half. Before that, we were doing OK, selling maybe 2-2,500 copies, which
is decent. There’s some profit as well for the artist. Now, suddenly the
numbers are changing completely. Maybe our music isn’t as popular as it was
two years ago, in that field, but the numbers changed so much. Clearly, you get
some income from digital, but digital can keep selling forever, so you can’t
count it in six months. So, maybe there’s some good money coming in, but you
have to look at in five years. With a record, you sell out, then you make
calculations; say, every six months you press 700, 500, whatever, it’s much
more under control. With digital you don’t know what the income is. We had
some tracks that came out on digital a year-and-a-half ago, and we’ve only
started selling them now. We saw the last reports, and suddenly they were 200%
more, instead of selling like five in three months, now we sold like 50, they were
picking up somehow, and every once in a while they were bringing some money
into the machine. But you can’t calculate that so it’s difficult. But now we
stick to the amount of copies we know we can sell. If we know we can sell 500,
we press 300, so we’re really safe. That’s the only way to keep going if you’re not
rich and don’t want to waste money. Otherwise, you have to DJ to pay the debts
for records. But if you don’t make records, then you don’t DJ, so it’s like a
dog biting his tail. If you keep doing it, even if you’re
in a negative moment, something might happen, like a record might make it to a
bigger level, or you might license it. Something can happen, so the most
important thing is to make a proper plan to keep doing it, without losing all your money. Audience member Do you only press vinyl or CDs as well? Marco Passarani I don’t press CDs anymore because my distributor doesn’t want to sell them. So
we do digital in the digital format, through iTunes, Bleep, whatever, and we
do vinyl. We’ll do vinyl for ever, but we stick to slightly less than the
copies we know we can sell, so we make sure we don’t have any problems. If you
start a record label with no previous experience, what happens when you press
1,000 and sell 800, which is good, quite decent so you have 200 left? At some
point, if you keep making records, you have to put them somewhere, even the
space for the back catalog is a problem. So when someone tells me, “I’m
doing a label, it’s just digital,” I think, “OK, you’re releasing some stuff,
you’re not really doing a label.” Doing a label is all these things, it’s kind
of difficult. One area of our office, I have to rent it from a designer
because every day there is 20 copies coming back from a store somewhere. You
have to arrange for it, and deal with the returns and the shipping company,
arrange for it as cheaply as possible. A lot of things to do, especially if
you’re making music. Do you want to deal with this bullshit? Are you sure? I’m
not convinced that I’d start one now. Audience member Do you press your vinyl in Italy? Marco Passarani Not for ten years, because they were stealing money. They were changing the
price list every week, so I had to change. Typical Italian thing. At the moment
I’m working with Handle With Care, a company
in Berlin. They’re not a pressing plant but they take care of everything. You
do the artwork, they do the printing, they take care of the pressing, the
mastering, you can choose where you want to do it. They work with The Exchange in London, Dubplates & Mastering in Berlin, Optimal, all these companies. You just talk
to one person and they do all the processes for you, so it makes it really
easy. And if you’re selling records in Europe, they have an amazing deal with
the manufacturers where they can ship records for free to five countries in
Europe, like Belgium, Holland, places where you actually sell records mostly.
So it’s really good, and if you go to each company on your own, even though
it’s a bigger accounting problem, because then you have invoices from each
company, it’s not even cheaper. Working with them is really, really good. I’m
not doing promotion for them, it’s just a service and it’s amazing. You send
them the master and the artwork and they tell you two weeks or something.
Handle With Care, later I will tell you the name and give you the web page,
but those guys are really professional. Audience member What do you think the future of vinyl will be? Will it be there forever? Marco Passarani It will be there forever as a collectable, not many, but some. Music will
probably be free in a few years, subscriptions and things like that. But there
are people who still love to do this thing [picks up record] and open a
record. Audience member I do. Marco Passarani There will be limited editions and expensive packaging, things like that, that
will always be there. Maybe CDs will disappear. As for digital, I go for the
one I can get whenever I want. It’s still numbers, it’s not music anymore. Gerd Janson That’s it? Marco Passarani Grazie. Gerd Janson Thank you very much, Marco Passarani.