Download Italian Movie Nameless Gangster: Rules Of The Time
Gema Shisila
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!
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?
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).
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?
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?
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 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.
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?
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!
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!
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\u2014or had\u2014a reputation for rich assholes, see Berlusconi). Also, being a big city (for Italy), there isn\u2019t a real push to turn to the outside for input\u2014you have everything you need right here: touring bands, local bands, venues, crowds\u2014so we didn\u2019t even really know Milanese punks, and if we did, we didn\u2019t like the way they talked.
I\u2019ll 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\u2014Prag. 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\u2019s how I became a part of it.
To answer the \u201Cmore about Milano punk/DIY\u201D part of the question without going on for pages, I\u2019ll try to summarise it in a few key points. It has a great eye on what\u2019s happening outside of Italy (unfortunately, less on what\u2019s happening in other cities in Italy). It doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t stress enough how important these places are and how much they are missed in other parts of Italy and the world.
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\u2019re lucky you\u2019re 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\u2019s Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzioni, \u201CFuture Path Self-Productions\u201D. The vision of the label/collective was to make anything: tapes, zines, books, posters\u2014as 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\u2014the na\u00EFvet\u00E9, 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 \u201Cpurpose\u201D, the sense of community\u2026 you know, just DIY. The fact that the sound expanded beyond the hardcore punk realm with releases like TV Dust\u2019s Beep, Anno Omega\u2019s Magia, or Porta d\u2019Oro\u2019s Libero Pensatore / Porta d\u2019Oro is just a reflection of our diverse local scene\u2014after 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.
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