(excerpt of theinterview published in WASTED LANDSCAPES, http://www.code666.net, - author: Michele Giorgi (p) Wasted Landscapes/Code666, 2001. )

• M: Describe your personal project I Burn and the concept lurking beneath your music

I BURN is an industrial/experimental band, formed by me and Maurizio Landini, originally formed during the February of 1998, with a discography of 3 records released til now ("Infraharmonies, scald cavities" CD – Fuoco, "Ipertermia" 10" EP – StateArt, "3rd Degree Burns Ambience" CD – Old Europa Café) and the forthcoming I Burn VS Sshe Retina Stimulants "Subfried Traffic Perfection" CD for StateArt. The sound of I Burn, had been described as a sort of death/ambient full of more "up-to-date" noise oriented manipulations, and I agree quite a lot with this definition when it comes to describe our releases so far, while the new stuff is slowly becoming less "ordinary", the ambient is slowly becoming more "icy" and subtle, and the noisy elements are slowly becoming more focused, somehow rythmic, more hypnotic and not oriented in an "ordinary" industrial noise sense…The concept luriking beneath our music? Well, there’s no concept, except for the fact that our "iconography" was (and in some way still is, starting from the name itself!) iconographically oriented to the fire related phenomenas in our first 2 releases, where we were very interested in describing things as the spountaneous human combustion or the Hce using some sorts of audio-metaphors that would give a sort of attempt to descrive the sonic "ambience" created by these phenomena…Currently we’re sort of dropped this kind of "theme-oriented" approach, and the approach has become a non-approach, a take-it-as-it-is approach, focused on music and nothing else.

• M: Ordeal and I Burn are so different pictures of your feelings, just a matter of time passed by or something deeper about your inner mood?

Well…yes, the flowing of time surely modifies your view about things and your view about music, but I wouldn’t say that the different things I do in music are only depending by the time that passes, put it like this it could probably mean that I am too constantly immature to do the same thing and as the time pass I discover things and try to do what looks more "mature" compared to the other…and that’s not the case, really. Making music, and the way to do it, depends on too many factors to elaborate in a logical sense your question, it depends on the technical factor, it depends on the mood factor, it depends on too many things, it depends on life – so, yes, everything I do is a picture of my feelings and my DEEP appeal for the grey side of life (or at least of MY life). I must say, anyway, that recently the musical shapes that Ordeal and I Burn are taking are slowly but steadily becoming one very similar to each other…Ordeal is approaching a more experimental way to assemble sounds, while I Burn is approaching a less noisy and "fierce" way to keep going on…

• M: From Black metal to hard-core, from industrial to ambient, you have a really wide range of interests in music (not to mention your deep knowledge in cult movies and esotheric letterature). What is able nowadays to attract your interest and how did you approach so different attitudes?

Well, I currently have a double-face kind of relationship with my passion for music (and when I say music, I say music, not genres)…On a side, I got really bored of any pre-cooked kind of conception realted to music, I got bored of the conception of music strictly based on the 7 notes, so I’m really attarcted by any kind of artist able to deconstruct music and rebuilt it’s idea in para-musical forms…that’s why I’m a big fan of artists as Francisco Lopez or Koji Asano, whose approach with sound is 1000% pure, not strictly musical but at the same time absolutely musical, strictly connected with the sound phenomenon and not with any kind of old, boring musical structure in a common sense…and that’s why I’m nowaday mainly attracted by any kind of artist that try to go beyond the dogmas, may them be darkambient artists or noise artists or metal artists or hc artists or blah blah blah, I like extremely different things such as Neurosis or Orphx or Genocide Organ or Emiliana Torrini because they are able to surpass the schemes in the "genres" they make, and that’s quite important to me when I have to choose the things I listen daily. On the other hand I must say that the more the time passes and the more I’m standing at 2 opposite poles, extremely addicted to listening new things and at the same time attracted to old, unfashionable, hype-less music…I’m a music-lover so I always try to find and listen things I think I may have missed in the past, and that’s why in my record collection you can find ultra-updated shelves of compact discs near to shelves of dusty and scratched vinyls of bands as Durutti Column or Black Flag or Celtic Frost or huge collections of very old Dischord Records vinyls, and blah blah, thousand of other titles…That’s’ the pure and simple way I approach so many different attitudes: randomly. I’m TOO in love with music to decide to leave something out in favour of something else, so if there’s something I like, I listen it. When it comes to the projects I play, the situation is different, obviosuly, because I play the stuff I’m 100% into, and not just 85% or 40% (because your appreciation of something can’t always be constant every time)…

• M: Gabriele nowadays: the band, the label, whatever else? A brief introduction to your current projects. Do you prefer to act like a label manager, a musician or a writer?

My current projects are obviously the I Burn and Ordeal projects, my label Pre-Feed (see http://move.to/Pre_Feed for infos), I write every now and then for an italian major musical magazine, and I write for an italian portal/web-magazine dedicated to italian B-movies and weird culture… As for the last part of the question, I’m not a label manager...that’s such a big definition…you can call yourself a label manager when you deal with Madonna or Britney Spears, because the size of the artists need a correct "weight" of the way you let the others define yourself…(and I don’t think I can call myself so with only a half dozen records released in ridicolous amounts and not even a bank account!) I’m just someone who needs to do something active when it comes to approaching with the stuff he likes, since I think releasing records is the greatest thing you can do to be part (call it a "scene" or call it what you prefer) of something musical you appreciate, and since the "scene" I appreciate is luckily enough quite small and "down to earth" when it comes to record pressings and artists and stuff like that, I’m just a lucky man who can transform his passion by putting his efforts in something more real and effective for the thing he is part of… I’m not even a musician, if you follow the current schemes of the definition of muscian. I prefer to say that I’m a an assembler of audio waves, that’s quite correct as a definition… Well, nothing stands out more than other if I refer to my activities, I feel all of them very linked togheter and one depending from the other, and each activity is able the fill the momentary moments of life-loss of the others, when I’m building a record I’m less focused on the label and when I’m working to plan a release for the label (mainly when I have money!) I don’t focus on doing music, and the thing goes on this way…

• M: You have an underground label, are you scared by mp3 and internet technology or do you consider them like natural allied?

No, I’m not scared at all…A little label or a little projects like the ones I have can nothing but receive benefits from the MP3s and the growing technologies and ways to using them…I don’t think mp3s will replace normal CD, at least not for the moment, because some essential fetish elements for people who buys CDs would be missing in a second, the cover art, the package, the social implications of going out and buy a Cd in a shop, and that’s somehting that people doesn’t appreciate, if someone will find a way to make the mp3 format as complete as a normal Cd could be (for example, find a way to have a format that includes in the mp3 some kind of animations that could replace the Cd cover art, or a way to make the overall fruition of an mp3 file more similar to the fruition of a Cdrom, where you can have music and lyrics and images and extras that would replace the way you approach the package of a CD, then YES, I think mp3s coul replace normal CDs, and then it’d be just a question of changing perspectives, transition from old to new, progress. And then the one of us who will be willing to accept the change will benefit from it, and the ones who doesn’t accept the change, it’s their problem. Just think at the transition from the old gramophones to the normal vinyl player, or from the radio to the TV, it was scaring, a new format and a new way to use it, but it worked, and that’s probably the same thing that will happen in the immediate future with the old CD and the new digital format. And also, if they ever will find a way to have a more "rich" kind of digital format, or a more "rich" kind of mp3 itself, I think it would be better because the digital format is incredibly more democratic compared to the Cd or the vinyl, it doesn’t lack audio-quality (at least not in a drastic way, and you can make it near to perfection if you know how to encode/decode, etc.) and it’s accessible to everyone, it has costs near to zero and you can deal and work with it directly from your room, it’s easy to handle unlike the current formats which could only be handled via someone else, a pressing plant, a studio…As for the apects fo this story more connected to the so called "piracy", such as the Napster thing, I think the people today who are really scared of such kind of digital format and are scared of the audio-files trading thing that’s going on nowadays are the people who still are very very refractory to understand that at the point we are now trading audio files over the net doesn’t affect record sales, because the percentage of people who have always bought record in a regular way will never stop buying records because they have mp3s stored in their hard disks, since the fetish approach with the printed cover art, the package, the printed lyrics, is something you cannot put on a side only because the music is free, and at the same time the people which ONLY collect mp3s are the very same people who have a very passive approach to the music, probably only listen the latest hit single on the radio and doesn’t buy records anyway because they only seek for the hit of the moment to listen for a couple of days…Also, MP3 trading is the more democratic promo campaign someone could ever receive nowadays, because we are talking of a several thousands of people who stores in their hard disks music they REALLY like, and with such kind of computer-to-computer relation is like a door to door promotion NOT controlled but anyone corporate or linked to lables but themselves, they CHOOSE what they like, and what they like may be the hit single chart artists or the artists who’s done an album in 300 copies…and the kind of promotion they give by sharing and making the music accessible to anyone else is the same for both kind of artists.

• M: Talking with someone so deeply involved into extreme music, I can't avoid to request your all-times playlist…

Some of my all-time faves (in alfabetical order, of course…) are Archon Satani "Virgin birth born again",Assuck "Anticapital", Bad Sector "Dolmen factory", Brighter Death Now "Innerwar", Black Flag "Split it in" and "My War", Celtic Frost "Into the pandemonium", Ccc Cnc Ncn "Suicidio modi d'uso", Die Kreuzen "Die Kreuzen", Morthound "Spindrift", Dead Can Dance "Spleen and ideal", Durutti Column "LC", Dag Nasty "Can I Say", Genocide Organ "Liechenlinie", Tomas Koner "Teimo", Lycia "The burning circle and then dust", Francisco Lopez "Untitled Music For Geography", Swans "White light from the mouth of infinity", Sigillum S "Hallucinated moisture of a synoptic slaughterhouse", SPK "Information overload unit" + "Zamia Lehmanni", Talk Talk "Laughing stock", The 3rd And The Mortal "Painting on glass"…

• M: Future projects.

The new I Burn is planned to be released on the german label STATEART ( www.stateart.de ) within a few months, it’ll be called "Subfired Traffic Perfection" and it’s a work completely done collaborating with Paolo Bandera of SSHE RETINA STIMULANTS and Sigillum S, while the new Ordeal CD, "Ma’an", is planned for September of this year on EIBON RECORDS ( www.eibonrecords.com ); in the meantime we have a track in the "Inquinamento Acustico" compilation CD out for OKTAGON RECODS, whom we’re also discussing the release of a 12" with. The new Pre-Feed release is planned to be ready in a couple of months, please check out my website for infos. In the meantime, as already said, I’m officially writing for Mondoculto, a webmagazine that anyone who’s interested in italian B-movies and weird cultures should check out (www.mondoculto.com ).