Massimiliano Adelmo Giorgini

Mass Giorgini: Producer/Engineer (Anti-Flag, Rise Against, Alkaline Trio, etc), CoProductions include Billie Joe Armstrong (of Green Day), Kris Roe (of the Ataris), John Strohm (of the Lemonheads), Paul Mahern (producer of John Mellencamp, Iggy Pop), and Anjali Dutt (producer of Oasis, My Bloody Valentine). Sonic Iguana Studios founder. Screeching Weasel bass. Squirtgun bass/b. vocals, Common Rider bass/sax. Occasional contributor to Punk, Rock Sound, and Punk Planet magazines.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Column and Interview in PUNK Magazine (Italy)

In late July, the first issue of the Italian music zine titled PUNK Magazine to feature a column and interview I wrote finally appeared on Italian newsstands. The column is a piece about the ever-changing nature of punk rock as a music form, and how that relates to the original definitions, and compares to what is currently called “punk” by the mainstream entertainment media. In the column, I discuss the original sociopolitical content of some of the punk pioneers, and compare that to the current trend of combining politics with punk music.

Also discussed in the column are a few bands I have worked with over the last year, including Scarred Hope, a punk band with a strong reggae influence, and healthy dose of inspiration from bands like the Clash and Operation Ivy. Scarred Hope hail from Redcliffe, Queensland in Australia (hometown of the BeeGees), and come from working-class backgrounds that add fuel to their vitriolic lyrics about racial, class, and religious discrimination. I had the opportunity to produce their upcoming album, Blue Collar Suicide, in Foxhole Studios in Brisbane, Australia last October, and brought the tracks back home to Sonic Iguana Studios for editing, mixing, and mastering.

Another band I discussed in the column was Los Pepiniyoz, a band from Puerto Rico that traveled to Lafayette to record their new album with me at Sonic Iguana. Their music is largely inspired by the early pioneers of pop-punk, like the Ramones and the Dickies. Their lyrics are entirely in Spanish, and they sing about the dreams and hopes of their fellow islanders, as well as about growing up punk in Borinquen. Their album is now complete, and they are currently searching for a US label to release it stateside.

In the same issue of PUNK Magazine, the first part of an interview I did with Lookout Records founder Lawrence Livermore appears alongside several photos from the early days of the label. In the interview, Livermore answers questions about, and provides insight, into the explosion of the pop-punk music scene in the early nineties, and way that the increased popularity changed the scene itself. The specific points covered range from his early relationship with Operation Ivy, his involvement from the earliest days of Green Day, to his eventual decision to leave the label entirely. Part two of the same interview will appear in the subsequent issue of PUNK Magazine.

Monday, October 25, 2004

Update Long Overdue...

It has been just over two months since I last updated this blog. This has been the result of too much going on, rather than too little.

The experience in the position of Lecturer in Foreign Languages & Literature has been very rewarding so far, despite the massive amount of preparation it requires. Teaching has turned out to be a real pleasure for me, and in practice seems to have many parallels to music production. Helping a student learn a language, and work to improve pronunciation and sentence construction is not entirely different than working with musicians to get the best take, refining pitch and timing with successive performances.

My course assignments changed somewhat just after my prior posts, and I am actually teaching Italian 101 and Italian 105, rather than two courses of ITAL 101. The 105 course also starts from the very beginning of the language basics, but moves at an accelerated pace, covering the contents of both Italian 101 and 102 in just one semester. The course is intended for individuals who have already had some exposure to the Italian language, or who have studied one of the other Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, French, or Romanian.

In the studio, I have been working on a slew of projects, many that I began working on several months ago (including one project begun in 2001) and are just winding to completion.

The National Trust album is fully recorded, and largely edited and compiled. Kris Roe and I are in the process of scheduling a mix date at this time.

Lights Out, an excellent band from Atlanta that draws influence from a variety of source as diverse as the Living End and the Steve Miller Band, came up and recorded at Sonic Iguana Studios in August. They will be coming back up to finish a few vocal tracks and mix with me in the coming weeks.

I am in the final stages of mixdown for the upcoming Horace Pinker album, many tracks of which were initially recorded in 2001. One EP, titled “Red-Eyed Regular,” from the first session was released in March of 2003. A few new songs were added to the batch this summer, as well as some new vocal parts being layered onto the original tracks.

In addition, I have continued to write columns and conduct interviews for PUNK Magazine and ROCK SOUND Magazine, both based in Italy.

As a musician, long-time friend and colleague Ben Foster (a.k.a. Ben Weasel) and I have formed a new band with keyboardist Jenny Choi, drummer Philip Stone, and guitarist Pat McLimans. So far, we have done only one full rehearsal, and a few other meetings of parts of the group. Ben is the singer/songwriter of this project, and has already written several new songs for the band. The intent is a serious, performing unit with the possibility of short tours in the future, although there are no specific plans at this time. At this time, Ben is very occupied with the details of the re-release of several Screeching Weasel records, and we have not been able to fully organize and prepare as we would like.

More updates soon…