Psychedelic eMagazine ISSUE #3 | Page 6

6 INTERVIEW INTERVIEW PHOBOS INTERVIEW LOONEY MOON RECORDS coming to their party, instead of aiming to offer a better product and to improve the whole Italian psychedelic-trance scene. From Blasting sounds to amazing visuals, Looney Moon Records is all about underground quality! We meet with Phobos, Label Head and Label Dj of Looney Moon for an all inclusive interview! Thank you for meeting us bro! F: Thank you for the opportunity! PM: When did your Trip start with PsyTrance? F: I met psytrance for the first time in some underground parties in Milan, but my first contact with a proper psytrance party was in Zurich for a NYE party 97/98. I was coming from a techno club scene and a punk scene and I immediately fell in love with it because I felt psytrance as the logical evolution of both my previous scenes. PM: And what brought you to the decision to start your own label? F: At the beginning Looney Moon was just a party organization, but after 2004 we started to feel like spreading around our music idea, because at that time psytrance mainstream music was getting very bad, for our music taste of course. We thought there was a total regression in the musical research: lots of cheesy stuff , lots of pop vocal samples inside the tracks , no underground , no new ideas, nothing fresh. Fog and I had already a precise style of music in mind, we just tried to keep it alive until we could finally start Looney moon records in 2008. Our first release has been the compilation “Visionary System”. This V/A was a kind of an experiment because we put there some different styles as close as we possibly could to the one we had in our mind. PM: As a Dj and label manager you must be listening to tons of music! How do you sort it all out, what are the Looney Moon “standards” for you? F: That’s right. I have to listen to tons of music everyday . I must say that our “standards” are not that strict... as you can figure out when you listen to our music. First of all we look for an idea and when i say “idea”, I mean a particular musical point of view: it must be fresh , innovative and it has to fit well with our label style. Of course we don’t need to have exactly the same music style from our artists, but we want our style to follow a specific “music line” , then we can have some artists who make music closer to night time and other closer to morning time, but this “specific line” has to point in our direction. Done that, we can start to look for music quality; if we find an artist with very good music ideas , but without quality in his stuff , he’s not ready for Looney Moon records for sure. Our music must sound clear and powerful ...everytime. PM: A few words about the Italian psy-scene? I’ll give you three: too many parties! Everybody wanna make parties and everybody wanna be a dj and of course not everybody can do it . Being a party maker or a dj means already having a huge musical background (and not just an electronic music background, but a wider one!) a very strong passion, and most of all you have to be able to control your ego. If you don’t have these skills, you could be a dj or an organizer ...but you will just suck at it everytime . At the end, here in Italy we have tons of parties every week, but actually you can find just very few good ones, just 1 or maybe 2 for month . That’s not good because quantity is not always quality and therefore organizers often just fight between each other for just fifty people more PM: What is your favorite hour for performing and why? That’s an easy question for me, because almost everybody knows that I like to play close to dawn. It feels like the perfect time for the music I play, and in my opinion it is the best time to bring the dancefloor into my music story. Usually I try to adapt my set to the time, the people and the venue I play in, b