I really enjoy interviewing my heroes. This time I asked Marcho Fringe a few questions and his answers did not disappoint my expectations. The Italian version of the text is available here, the translation below is mine. I hope I have conveyed Marcho’s thoughts well.
Luigi: “The first time I heard about Gronge was on the pages of Tutto, but it may be that I remember badly and that this happened on the pages of Rockerilla, by far my favorite among the Italian music magazines of the time. It must have been 1992. “Wish” by the Cure had just been released and I was devouring music magazines looking for information on Robert Smith and his companions. Those magazines were lost, if I had kept them now I could read what they said about you and Gronge.
I remember some short articles talking about Afterhours, CCCP, CSI and Marlene Kuntz, I remember reading something about “Teknopunkabaret”. I wrote down that name in my mind along with the name of the Ordo Equitum Solis and Minus Habens (yes, it had to be Rockerilla) but as interesting as these names seemed to me, I decided to explore something else. I didn’t have faith in Italian music. I’ve been to some Marlene Kuntz concerts, some Afterhours concerts, a CCCP reunion without Ferretti, I’ve seen Massimo Volume, Disciplinatha and Diaframma but if you search my record collection you won’t find any albums by these bands, you’ll find a couple of Gronge that I found at a record fair. Gronge have been active since 1985 and a few weeks ago I know that you performed in Rome. I missed them and I’m kicking myself. How did it go?”
Marcho: “How are the things that you always deal with as if it were the last time in your life that you deal with something. My egoic alter insists on these keys of an old dusty and out of tune piano like a saloon player in a Tarantino film… I would get myself killed for what I do but only for the sake of doing it the way I and the people who care about me like it. Repertoire of crime scene finds over which blows the impetuous wind of an improvisation so spontaneous and effective that it seems false like a large part of the musical dramas that take place in these latitudes. GRONGE beyond life.”
Luigi: “The feeling I have listening to Gronge’s records is that you have remained pure, true to yourselves, not willing to accept compromises, intent on pursuing art at any cost, intransigent, straight, incorruptible and not interested in the judgment of critics and of the public. Is it really like that?”
Marcho: “Hard and pure like a lasagna forgotten in the microwave oven that has continued to turn on itself since time immemorial. The metaphorical career is all here, the only task is to decide whether to eat a cold, almost cadaverous dish, one heated with commemorative candles or to continue to raise the heat until it burns. But the court’s judgment is corrupt and corruptible and therefore not compatible. If I were fire I wouldn’t be here but heating the whole world”
Luigi: “Sometimes I wake up with “Defilippis Dead” in my head and I start singing the chorus. The song is the manifesto of what I have always tried not to be, what I fight and what I try not to become. For years I have seen De Filippi, Berlusconi and his television, a good part of national television as the enemy to fight. “We are not the mass of zombies that you want to imagine and propose to an imaginary public which then forms the set of choices, the set of behaviors which sociologically could be defined as disfiguring the environment, with all the mass of people who, by dressing like you, try to imitate a preordained model, everything always coordinated, always ready to consume everything you order them to consume”. “Defilippis Dead” is from 2012, one of the few Gronge albums available on bandcamp, the situation seems to me to have worsened since then, the general grayness has taken on darker shades, dramatically black. You still fight every day, your photographs, your paintings and your music say so. What is art for you? Can art pull us out of the quicksand into which we have fallen? Or are we losing our battle?”
Marcho: “Art is an interruption of the flow of meaning. Explainer: when a filmmaker decides to shoot a scene and only that interrupts the flow of meaning to which that scene was connected to reconstruct another with other meanings. The same goes for sounds, colors, etc., etc.
We are all always sick, so truly sick that they hospitalized us in the house for a long time all together to make us sing on the balconies in the evening. Imaginative collective happening called epidemic but the shows and performances are the order of the day and the public is the protagonist everywhere…zombies are everywhere, zombies are us. Art saves us by condemning our every material gesture including our thoughts. Ps the lyrics of de filippis is dead were the result of improvisation. To write the lyrics I had to listen to what I had sung again.”
Luigi: “I would love to one day follow you from afar as you walk through the streets of Rome and capture the moments when you take your photos. I imagine you doing this every day. Maybe you are forced to walk for work, maybe you are a postman or a courier, you visit all kinds of suburbs and while you do so your eyes never miss the opportunity to transform a piece of paper thrown on the asphalt, a crumpled can, a stain into art on the wall, a piece of orange plastic clinging with all its strength to a rusty mesh. But it may be that I am wrong and you will tell me that you leave the house every day to take photos. I am tied to a chair to live but in my head I think about what I will transfer to paper the next morning. How are you doing? What brings you to where you take photos?”
Marcho: “You are insightful and algorithmic not artificial. I worked as a courier and many other jobs. I don’t photograph as a hobby, in fact I don’t actually photograph the variations on the score of a regenerated look and an internalized listening. I can find reasons of interest even with a straight jacket and forced to look at the same point I would be able to crumble that point on the white wall and observe the reflections on the lens of the nurse who installs the electrodes on my temples. I can no longer stop intercepting and continuing to describe the fantastic universe of the apparent normality of a Kleenex dropped from a car window in the fuck parking lot. You lie down on your seats, make yourself comfortable, fuck and leave your traces, then I’ll take care of making it a gesture, representation and comedy. Don’t try to follow me, I often go on roads that are dangerously devoid of pavement.”
(To Be Continued)
For more Gronge visit his bandcamp page.
