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Italy's New Wave Scene Was the Product of Vintage Filesharing

Long before Joseph Gorden-Levitt's hitRECord, where creatives upload unfinished content in an attempt to produce collaborative work, squatters from northern Italy were making their own crowdsourced art and music projects.
Exclusive video courtesy of Strut Records

I recently watched Joseph Gorden-Levitt's recruitment video for hitRECord—that site of his where writers, artists and 'creatives' upload hours and pages of unfinished content in an attempt to produce collaborative work. Although it feels like a fresh concept, JGL and his brother actually came up with it eight years ago.

But 25 years before that, a counterculture of squatters from northern Italy were making their own crowdsourced art and music projects.

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Mutazione, compiled by Alessio Natalizia of WALLS, is a collection of Italy's finest and rarest new wave music from the 80s. Featuring the likes of Doris Norton, whom Apple commissioned to make computer music in 1984, the compilation is like a time capsule with contents that still feel far ahead of their time.

Fed up with the political unrest between the 60s and 80s the artists created a deeply pyschological soundtrack in return. Rioting, street fighting, and political assassination had become common place, Italy's intellectual hubs, Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, were buzzing with activism and this computerized, junkyard soundtrack.

Through vintage forms of social networking and filesharing, a community-collaborative process steered their scene for eight years. In Milan, a collective called TRAX (as explained in the video above), would publish zines and records that predated terms like crowdsourcing, and creative commons, but grasped some similar concepts. For instance, they'd make songs together where the first person recorded a track on a tape, sent the tape to the next collaborator, and so forth.

One of the tracks on the mix, "Niccolai," by Laxative Souls, features samples from a phone call in which a terrorist group gives directions to the location of the body of Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democrats, who was murdered in 1978. Indeed, this compilation isn't contemporary electronic music, but in my opinion, better. These are the lo-fi, retro-future electronic music pioneers, and honestly, contemporary EDM artists will need to learn a thing or two from Mutazione.

@danstuckey