Moods 25: Anders Villani

Hello April bbs. We made it and continue to make it through this. This month we've got poet and author @anders-villani on Moods dooties, who takes us from spoken word to ballad to slow, deep rolls from the Melbourne coast. Sending light and love from us to you. xx

(1) Where did you grow up? Was it a single place or many places? How did this influence the songs you listened to?

I was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, where I still live, a four-year spell in the American Midwest notwithstanding. For those who haven’t visited, Melbourne’s a big, cosmopolitan city, with a small-town sensibility thanks to its layout and architecture, as well as an outsized—and outspoken—love of the arts. What’s more, Melbourne’s a short drive from some of the most spectacular coastal, bush, and alpine scenery anywhere; there’s a sense, as there is throughout Australia, of a great amplitude of space and an abundance of natural beauty. The weather’s also beautiful, though unpredictable at times.

If I’m thinking specifically of how place affected my taste in music, therefore, it would be in this convergence of the starkly urban and the freeing, exploratory movement outwards into country that is a way of life in Australia, enshrined in almost all our national myths. Of course, given our colonial past—and present—this freedom carries with it a profound responsibility to acknowledge the traditional owners of our magnificent land. In central Melbourne, this is the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and I pay my respects here to their elders past, present, and emerging.

From an electronic-music perspective, it is in the concept of the bush doof, or rural, psychedelically oriented outdoor rave, that these elements of Australian experience most interweave. At such events, atmospheric styles like progressive and trance have historically been more prevalent than techno (this is changing a bit now), and the result for the subculture at large has been, I think, a certain irreverence to production and party aesthetics—a touch of the carnivalesque; a sense of music as a natural force; an emphasis not just on establishing patterns but also, judiciously, disrupting them. On not taking yourselves too seriously. There’s pathos, as there always is and must be in dance-music scenes, but also anticlimax, irony, silliness. I consider the development of my musical tastes to have been conditioned as much by the doof environment as the club, and I’d bet a lot of Aussies in the scene feel similar.


(2) Can you pick one song in the mix and explain where you first listened to it?

When I was ten years old—1999, argh!—my brother would give me his Sony Discman and a few electronic-music CDs to listen to some nights. This was during, arguably, the peak of the trance and progressive scenes in the UK and across Europe: think Sasha & Digweed, Paul Oakenfold, etc. At that time it was hard to separate the tasteful underground stuff from the cheese – Tiesto might play tracks in his set, for example, that Digweed would also play—and I feel like that’s a good thing. At least in Australia, there’s an appetite again for big synth melodies, drumrolls, a naughties tacky sheen, which I guess is consistent with that appetite across other aesthetic domains like fashion, graphic design, and so on. Anyway, maybe it was on one of the Gatecrasher mix compilations, I forget now, but Energy 52’s Cafe Del Mar had my ten-year-old self lying on the top bunk imagining he was flying through the clouds, dodging angels, riding up God’s back like the lip of a huge wave (I’m not religious). Euphoric, in other words. Ecstatic—outside myself at the same time as I was utterly within it. That love of trancey melancholia has never left me. It’s interesting, too, that as a writer of primarily poetry, my creative investments now centre on the evocation of what you might call states of knowing—in the coming together of idea and feeling and thing, the fullness of that, and their inevitable drifting apart again.

(3) Who “introduced” you to these songs? Was it a person, a radio station, a CD, or something else?

My older brother. He was the architect of my taste, and I was really lucky. He DJ’d, partied hard (perhaps too hard, which in itself was a good lesson), and collected records. From before I knew what music genres even were, I literally had everything from the Northern Exposure series to Melbourne Techno Massive mixes to Steve Lawler’s tribal house to UK breaks, to trance, to psy-trance, to Sven Väth’s Sound of the Season series, to virtually every Global Underground and Renaissance compilation, to C.J. Bolland, to Aphex Twin, and so much else besides, dropped into my lap. The music I love today is fundamentally the same as the music I loved twenty years ago (minus some Armin Van Buuren, but secretly not minus him).

(4) Where and when did you first hear techno? What drew you to it? Who did it sound like it was for?

When he was eighteen or so, my brother would go to raves in Melbourne’s Docklands put on by a group called the Melbourne Techno Massive. It was fast, hard, industrial, pulsating techno – very Detroit as opposed to say Berlin, I’d say now. What I remember thinking at the time was that it energised me in a unique sense—and I danced myself sideways to it—but also that it lacked the melodies and harmonies of the much lusher soundscapes I was used to in progressive house. It was more forbidding, in other words—less immediately easy on the palate. It was probably on hearing some of Sven Väth’s and Michael Mayer’s early compilations that my perspective on techno began to shift, that I started to understand how its strangeness was also its beauty, that there were more trailheads to ecstasy than big orchestral trance breakdowns, that it could reward your patience in ways unimaginable unless you put your time in, put your body in. Many, many years after that, I would move to Ann Arbor and go to my first parties in Detroit and truly get it.

(5) You’ve got the microphone. What do you want to say to the techno community?”

Your bodies are your Berghains. Hallow them.
Other people’s bodies are Panorama Bars: above.

1. Judith Wright: Interview with John Thompson
2. Harold Budd: Campanile
3. Fennesz: City of Light
4. Apparat: Wooden (Anders Ilar Remix)
5. Dosem: Visualization
6. Janeret: Ethereal
7. Lerr: Missing
8. Spiritcatcher and Compuphonic: Mastermind
9. Iio: Rapture (Original Extended Mix)
10. River Yarra: Frogz ov Gondwana
11. Amandra, Mattheis: Malpa Malpa
12. Artefakt: Levity
13. Tina Arena: I Need Your Body
14. Skai: Mir Geht’s Gut
15. Rennie Pilgrim: Acid Part 3 (Remix)
15. Energy 52: Cafe Del Mar (Universal State of Mind Remix)
16. Seraphim Rytm: Entrance
16. Acronym, Korridor: Scending

I highly recommend buying Villani's recent book of poems, Aril Wire, to spend your weekends drifting through his prose:
fiveislandspress.com/catalogue/aril…anders-villani

And follow his recent pieces here:
www.instagram.com/andersvillani/

Villani's mix is then paired with a bleached denim and fire print from Korakrit Arunanondchai. Both the print and the mix explore a lot of contrasts—elements both natural and chemical. They make me think of music after a storm and building something beautiful with what we have left, which it turns out, will be a lot. More on Arunanondchai is here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbWxS9JToXM