Kisk talks Friends EP, Apparel Music and releasing on vinyl
Ciao Pete! It’s a pleasure to chat with you. I returned to the studio for producing after resting for a couple of years. I have to admit that with the amount of demos we receive at Apparel Music, I needed a moment to understand what I was really looking for, for the label and for myself. The jazzy direction is multifaceted and translating an emotion is not always that easy. When I finally understood that everything is really based on friendship and sharing, I simply gathered all these thoughts and started recording.
You’re originally from Italy and currently running Apparel Music in London. How is your style of music perceived in the city?
Milan is the city which has welcomed me years ago as a dj, and before starting Apparel Music, I worked on the project Oneboy, together with my partner Tatiana Carelli. This project was based on a varied group of artists who interacted among themselves and with my dj set. Free jazz, live in everything, with pieces chosen according to atmosphere and mood, and the theme was built up during the evening, it reflected surroundings and audience, with trumpet, string bass, flute, saxophone, professional musicians and “shifters”, selected and assembled into always changing bands, according to needs and the tenor of the evening. The respect I feel and the recognizability of my artistic direction and therefore of the label, do probably originate here. Jazzy is a way of conceiving music without frontiers, making the analogic communicate with the digital, the old with the new, figurative art with music.
Your release catalogue art is quite unique. Does the art play a big part for you when releasing music?
Apparel Music is basically a Factory. I select artists from the world of music in parallel to those from the world of figurative art. I believe its fundamental to vest a release, to create a parallel world which unfolds in the digital by means of images and videos. The audience is backed up by images which stimulate the imagination, in order to complete the voyage inside a reliable micro-world, making use of human traits and signs, just like the font we use, which is nothing else than our first designer’s, Luca Beolchi’s, calligraphy.
It’s good to see you’re releasing this EP on vinyl. What’s your reasons behind it? Don’t you find it a struggle competing against the digital djs?
I adore vinyl as much as the CD as a physical medium. I classify each product according to its message and depth. But we do have to take into consideration the new generation’s needs as well, I call them podcadsters: the kids going around or heading to work with headsets on, using ipods and cell phones to listen to their favourite music, make up the largest part of music consumers.
Music is in the message, not the format.
Let’s have a debate; English pizza or Italian pizza?
Aahha, pizza is quintessentially Italian, there are other things I appreciate in the UK.
The year is almost over… What else can we expect from Apparel Music?
Next year we’ll have Brothers’ Vibe in our files and in addition to that we’ll release the second album of Sarp Yilmaz, a double vinyl to lick your chops and then some … At work for my first album.
Top three tracks:
1. Miles Davis SM – Summertime
2. Ekkohaus – Noschool
3. Vakula – Sleepy Vision
Any closing words?
News aplenty, but there’s one I’d like to draw your attention to: the new spot directed by Federico Brugia for Rolling Stone Italia’s tenth anniversary, whose soundtrack I have produced together with Francesco Zani. Check on RollingStone or YouTube
Interview by Pete Callaghan