The History of the Mongezi Feza Collective, or how to Keep Underground Music Alive in Italy through Networking (and Arguing).
"Active in Italy from 1987 until 1997, the Mongezi Feza collective (of which Robert Wyatt was one of the honorary presidents) dealt with concert organization, radio broadcasting, as well as in the publishing branch with a magazine called Musiche. The heir to networking experiences such as Rock In Opposition or the Italian cooperative l’Orchestra, it perpetuated their artistic activities and ideological orientations, was the main Italian referent of a widespread “underground” music scene between the two decades, and represented – at least chronologically – the link between the organizations already mentioned and the circuito autogestito Circ.a, a more structured and comprehensive underground network. Mongezi Feza stood as an important reference point for many musical outsiders on the Italian territory, consolidating or creating links between numerous “heterodox” artists, an audience of curious listeners (both immune from the marketing schemes of the record industry and from most underground trends) and several daring music programmers. My speech, supported by an ad hoc interview with the founders of Mongezi Feza, will describe first of all the way in which the collective was created, how it operated, and the evolution of the Italian underground music network in the years in which it was active. This historical account will be the basis of a reflection on the cultural characteristics of the aforementioned network: while privileging underground and heterodox artistic expressions, the different actors of this network did not identify with any specific musical scene: instead, they committed to any music that would challenge tastes and ideas, without indulging in snobbery or superficial eclecticism. Finally, and with particular reference to the magazine Musiche, I will address the “polemical edge” of the collective through the criticisms it made about different aspects of underground music management (especially its promotion and media coverage): in retrospect, we can affirm that those criticisms proved to be far-sighted in exposing several weaknesses of the underground music networks."