Minimal Wave Records

One Wed­nesday in Sep­temb­er of 1978, a new band was born in Mestre (Venice, Italy). It was named “Ruins” after a Fred Firth com­posi­tion featured on Henry Cow’s high­ly in­fluen­ti­al LP “Un­rest” from 1974.

The first line-up was for­med by Al­es­sandro Piz­zin (keyboards) ac­companied by Fran­co Moruz­zi (drums) and Girogio Sal­vedego (bass guitar), and featured a young in­novative guitar­ist and com­pos­er named Alex Masi. Oc­casional­ly joined by a young multi-talented per­form­er and mus­ical com­rade named Al­es­sandro Monti, the band was way ahead of its time in what would soon be­come the Italian in­depen­dent music scene.

In the Spr­ing of 1979, Alex Masi left the pro­ject and Pier­giusep­pe Cir­an­na came on board. Then in the early 1980s, Cir­an­na & Piz­zin re-organized Ruins as an ex­periment­al combo. The group focused on electronic de­vices and mixed media, draw­ing en­er­gy from power­ful­ly fresh paint­ings and photos by Gian­ni Vol­pato and Al­es­sandro Rigato, while forg­ing a new mus­ical path towards origin­al no-dance music and dark electronic ‘post prog’ pop songs.

In May of 1981, Ruins re­cor­ded a few brand new tunes in­clud­ing “Elegant Shout”, “Short Wave”, and “You’re Like A Cigaret­te”. These were to be­come the cor­nerstone of the pro­ject that would fol­low.

In early June of 1981, the band put a lot of en­er­gy into shoot­ing a short film in­side the “Re­stless House”. This piece would have been the video for “Short Wave”. Shot en­tire­ly on 16mm film, every­one claimed that it was a gem in the mak­ing. But with­out pro­fes­sion­al man­age­ment, all the raw footage was lost be­fore it would be edited. As far as we know, the footage doesn’t exist nor does any photog­raphic evi­d­ence sur­vive to tell the tale.

On Sep­temb­er 4th of 1980, Art Retro Ideas re­leased one of the very first Italian, in­depen­dent, New Wave LP com­pila­tions en­tit­led “Sam­ples Only” featur­ing three Ruins songs: “Short Wave”, “Re­stless House” (re­cor­ded in July 1981), and “Elegant Shout”. On Novemb­er 21, they re­leased the first Ruins 45rpm single en­tit­led “Short Wave” (along with the b side, “You’re like a cigaret­te”). The LP and the single got great re­views in the press and were well re­ceived by both in­depen­dent and major re­cord labels alike.

Sever­al new songs were re­cor­ded over the co­ur­se of 1981, but the band needed to grow and to start audi­tions for a pos­sible new line up which would begin in early June of 1982. By the end of the month, Fran­co Moruz­zi was asked to take the drum stool once again while Mas­simo Be­rtat­to (bass) and Moreno Bar­bazza (per­cuss­ion and back­ing voc­als) joined the new quin­tet combo.

The new line-up re­hear­sed for a few weeks be­fore re-recording al­most all the origin­al songs that Cir­an­na & Piz­zin had re­cor­ded as a duo. Other new, be­auti­ful, power­ful com­posi­tions were born and careful­ly re­cor­ded with the Anna Rich mobile studio. Some were re­leased on a li­mited edi­tion tape en­tit­led “Art Dance”, and oth­ers were filed in the Ruins archives for fu­ture re­lease.

Dur­ing the late autumn of 1982, five ex­periment­al “con­cep­tu­al videos” were fil­med and pre­sen­ted in Mestre. The 5-piece-combo con­tinued to per­form live, as it had throug­hout the year, with en­thusias­tic re­views.

In early 1983, one of the songs re­cor­ded in 1982 (“I Don’t Know”) was re­leased and featured on the “Rockgarage Com­pila­tion Vol.1” sampl­er or­ganized by the in­depen­dent magazine Rockgarage.

In 1983, the band sig­ned with a major label to re­lease the new single “Fit of Ner­ves”, a song from the Ruins/duo re­per­toire that had been com­plete­ly rea­rran­ged and re­cor­ded in Janua­ry that year. The band it­self pro­vided the 4-track re­cord­ing of “Stroll of Girls” as the b-side, chos­en simp­ly for what it was: a bi­zar­re in­strument­al.

While sett­ing up pro­mo­tion for the new single, Cir­an­na & Piz­zin (along with Vol­pato, Rigato, and the bril­liant young photog­raph­er Stefano Padovan) wor­ked on a new multi­media per­for­mance based on some of Wil­liam Bur­roughs’ works.

It was a high­ly creative time. Piz­zin & Cir­an­na had star­ted work­ing on a rea­l­ly weird side pro­ject: the com­plete cover vers­ion of the en­tire album Ad Gloriam by the in­ter­national­ly acclaimed Italian prog band Le Orme. The songs (original­ly dated 1967) were com­plete­ly re­in­terpreted by the use of main­ly electronic sounds (with lots of “first genera­tion” old drum mac­hines and stran­ge sound modules, such as the Piz­zynth, for in­stan­ce, a rude han­dmade tone generator built by Al­es­sandro him­self for this pur­pose). Un­for­tunate­ly, the pro­ject never got the at­ten­tion it de­ser­ved from the men-in-charge of the re­cord­ing com­pany and the demo quick­ly lost momen­tum. Meanwhile, the 5-piece line-up sud­den­ly dis­ban­ded.

Then in 1983, Fricchet­ti Pro­duc­tion re­leased a speci­al li­mited tape & book­let issue en­tit­led “Side Roads”, which featured both of the band’s di­rec­tions. The ‘ex­periment­al’ stuff in­cluded some of the early audio/­visu­al per­for­mance materi­al and some pre­vious­ly un­released solo re­cord­ings while the more ‘pop’ side featured songs from the early duo’s re­cord­ings sess­ions such as “New Re­cord”, “Tri­cks To Sur­vive”, “I Don’t Know” and the won­der­ful­ly gor­ge­ous, jazzy tune “Skeleton In Love”. There were also two in­strument­als per­for­med live as a trio in Janua­ry of 1981 (“The Try”) and with the quin­tet combo in early 1982 (“Brain Flakes”). An­oth­er 4-track studio re­cord­ing was featured in this rare re­lease, a brand new Cir­an­na song cal­led “Red lips”. This “Side Roads” cas­sette also featured a few origin­al line draw­ings from Rober­to Roseano (who at the same time began to work on the Ruins multi­media di­mens­ion).

Two other side pro­jects began dur­ing this time, and were both bi­zar­re and un­predict­able, as al­ways. The first was a Devo / Re­sidents med­ley as a tri­bute to these two in­fluen­ti­al bands. This very soon led to the idea of an en­tire origin­al songs com­pila­tion com­posed in pure (or strict­ly re­lated) Devo / Re­sidents style. Rober­to Roseano also pro­vided the cover de­sign and the re­cord­ings were com­plete but the lack of money at the time for­ced Ruins to ab­an­don the idea.

The other weird pro­ject was a selec­tion of clas­sic Latin American songs that were in­terpreted in a brand new electro-context. Un­for­tunate­ly, only a proto-demo vers­ion of this ex­peri­ment sur­vived.

In the mean­time, a new band was set up, with the young and talen­ted bass play­er Pippo Monaro but this line-up soon broke as well, due to the lack of real sup­port from the label and the man­age­ment. Cir­an­na & Piz­zin went back to work­ing as a duo.

Ruins con­tinued to push ar­tistic boun­da­ries main­ly towards an electronic and dark-oriented sound. New drum mac­hines and sequenc­ers made a mas­sive ap­pearan­ce in Ruins’ sound and with very in­terest­ing re­sults. Drum loops were used (sampl­ers weren’t yet avail­able to the band) to ob­tain a more natur­al feel in the rhy­thm sec­tion and to com­ple­ment the heavy bass lines of the Korg MS20 synth. The band was con­tac­ted by a new in­depen­dent man­age­ment com­pany (BSR) who of­fered to take care of Ruins work and, thanks to the help of a local re­cord shop owner, Ruins was able to re­lease their first 12” EP of 4 songs which featured their hit “Fire!”. This song got so much at­ten­tion from the press and from the audi­ence that it drove the band di­rect­ly to a major re­cord label deal to re­lease a 12” single (b-sided with the brand new tune “Crime”).

While work­ing on new songs for the ex­pec­ted fol­low up, the duo also had the chan­ce to re­lease a com­plete­ly in­strument­al, ex­periment­al LP in con­nec­tion with the works of Venetian paint­er Luigi Viola. This re­lease was en­tit­led “Marea/Tide”.

In Novemb­er of 1984, BSR asked the American video di­rec­tor Paul Al­lman to set-up a pro­motion­al video for the song “Fire!”. The video was shot in near­by Venice the night be­fore Piz­zin was for­ced to leave for the milita­ry ser­vice. On Novemb­er 24, 1984 BSR show­cased the “Marea/Tide” LP re­lease with a speci­al party held in­side the won­der­ful Venetian villa “Villa Sag­redo”.

Once avail­able, both the EP and the Ruins video “Fire” re­ceived great re­views. They were im­mediate­ly featured on major nation­al radio and televis­ion pro­grams, and in­cluded as the “band of the month video” on one of the major mus­ical in­depen­dent Italian TV pro­grams (De­ejay Televis­ion). There were multi­ple daily broad­casts on the all-music televis­ion chan­nel Videomusic, and the song went to the top of mus­ical charts from some of the era’s most im­por­tant FM radio sta­tions (Rai, Radio Studio 105, and Radio De­eJay).

At the same time, Cir­an­na & Piz­zin com­posed and de­moed a few more songs to im­prove their new electronic sound.

At the re­quest of some in­ter­nation­al pro­mot­er, BSR ar­ranged with Al­lman to pro­duce an­oth­er pro­motion­al video clip for the “Fire!”. With the help of the owner of the Caval­lino Art Gal­le­ry video archive in Venice, Paul Al­lman and Ruins had the op­por­tun­ity to work com­bin­ing new im­ages and old rare archive video footage while film­ing the new video on Feb­rua­ry 6th, 1985.

After the last pro­motion­al ap­pearan­ce in Turin (in late Sep­temb­er of 1985) as part of the celeb­ra­tion for the 25th an­nu­al con­gress of Uni­ted Na­tions “O.I.L. Foun­da­tion”, th­ings began wor­sen­ing, and due to un­avoid­able man­age­ment pro­blems the band split up on Oc­tob­er 26th with­out hav­ing re­leased some of its best mus­ical ef­forts to date. Thus the Ruins ex­peri­ence and mus­ical lega­cy was put on hold.

Al­es­sandro Piz­zin went on mak­ing music pro­fes­sional­ly with bands like Hak­kah and Hex. He re­sur­faced a brand new Ruins line up dur­ing the late eight­ies, and con­tinued as an in­depen­dent pub­lish­er, label man­ag­er, pro­duc­er and solo art­ist re­leas­ing and pro­duc­ing vari­ous re­cords and pro­jects until now. Meanwhile, Pier­giusep­pe Cir­an­na took a dif­ferent pro­fes­sion­al route.