10 (or 20) years with

Buddha Stick go back a long, long way, to the very beginning of my adult life as a musician. The album released in 1996, Inaudito, was the result of over 10 years of experiments, fun and music, and I think it shows. In a truly Inaudito ("unheard of" in italian) way, it keeps circulating despite its age: people duplicate the original (it was printed in 1971 copies, and sold out in 15 months), download the mp3s (in huge numbers, throughout the 8 years it has been online) and exchange them on P2P networks; I keep receiving mail about it, and people that bought it back then still love it today. Inaudito was made at home, and was printed and distribuited by Nove Nove (it was actually NoNo CD 001), the label of 99 Posse.

(For anyone that has been wondering why would someone give saleable music away for free, the answer is simple. As the last copies of the CD were going, someone (Chris Mutter of enemy.org) proposed to put the album online in this new format called mp3 that none of us had ever heard about. We saw the scope of this move and said yes. It has proven the best choice we could make: it brought good karma, new friends, lots of lovely mail, and some work too.)

All the Inaudito songs were written between '95 and '96, with the exception of Carlo da Balduina and Omnia ab uno, earlier demos ('92) that made it on the CD because we were unable to reproduce the same mix.

Will there be another Buddha Stick album? Not in the near future. Below you can find all the released material by BS: Inaudito (in a new edition with an unpublished interview, in italian), excerpts from the live tour (1997) and a 1986 demo (only to prove Alberto Campo that his guess was absolutely right).

Sergio Messina/RadioGladio
march 2005

The album, kindly hosted by www.enemy.org since Fri Jul 25 18:25:56 MET DST 1997 (mp3).

The 10 pages liner notes, (in italian) artfully coded in html with the original layout by Chica.

A printable scan of the front cover, designed by Luke Skywalker and Sergio Messina (tiff, zip, 150dpi, 1.2 mb).

The original italian press release, including the only interview ever given by Buddha Stick (txt, zip. 8 kb).

Sovrano - instrumental vamp Buddha Stick live, Napoli 1997 (zip, mp3, 6,2 mb)

This is one of the few surviving excerpts from that show, recorded at the DAMM (Diego Armando Maradona Montesanto) in Naples. It was to be published in the follow up to Inaudito, Il Ministero dell'Ambiente - Buddha Stick live.

So what I Topi Ballano, taken from the may 1986 demo Soli e male accompagnati (zip, mp3, 4,8 mb).

This mono tune comes from the very first batch of songs by I Topi Ballano (which 10 years later became Buddha Stick). It shows what we were after when we started. The personnel is bass, guitar, drum machine (naively programmed), turntable and effect (only one, a pedal analog delay). It was recorded on a Tascam 4 track tape deck and also mixed on cassette. The multitrack machine and the guitar for this demo were lent by Marco Sacchetti and Fabio Finesi (thanks to both).

There are a number of things in this song that were unheard of at the time: guitar and turntable together, slow unchanging instrumental beats, scratching contemporary albums on a record... The story about Alberto Campo is simple; his favorable review of Inaudito (that I can't find right now) ended with the phrase: "They say they're doing this since 1985. If it's true we've all missed something". Reccomended only for filologists, maniacs and nostalgic old friends.