late august 2004: our correspondent salvatore is having a nice time in sorrento/italy. nuzzling his nose in black volcano-sand, chopping palm trees, hijacking hydrofoils and so on.. but he isn't around golfo di napoli only for his own little pleasure, he is seeking for some remnants of the legendary " good ol'  naples days", that the cryin' mice had, during their - let's call it: the unholy oliver- onions-period. they never talk much about it, we just know  that they had awful jam-sessions with some local pals and were recording their first drafts heading for a real caseous longplayer, when a rahter unpleasant meeting with some mighty naples-street-gang-cats ended kind of harsh. the second voice (-> oh my god, am i too fat) dropped out of the band. the mice left naples and the already recorded stuff behind. so far so sad. during the last months rumours about some still existing mice-tapes increased, and so salvatore tries to combine his hanging-out with some enquiries for our archive. but the harder he tries to find out something more about the ominous remnants, the more it all sounds like a joke: neither in the harshest clubs, nor in the most-sleazy harbor-taverns somebody seems to know a bit about them: "cryin' mice? huh? leave me alone, go annoy someone else..." and so on. ok. 'mission failed' says salvatore to himself after two weeks and heads for the station. he stops at the black market at piazza garibaldi for a quick pizza fritta and batteries for his walkman when suddenly a scooter stops next to him. an old lady offers him cassettes: the new van halen - best of both sides and  two rare bootlegs: gianna nannini live in wels/austria 1993 (supporting rod stewart) and a guns'n'roses-sampler  "the best of - compiled by klaus meine". salvatore mumbles: cool! how much? she twinkles: five euros for the local cat-asylum, and the joy is on your side young boy, believe me! they make business, say arrividerci and move along. salvatore enters the eurostar italia 239 firenze via roma termini, he can't wait to hear the stuff, inserts the nannini-live-tape and now: guess what!!?! salvatore can't believe it: gianna's opener "i maschi", her 1987 smash-hit comes soo smooth out of his five-year old 2,99 station-kiosk headphones, it nearly blasts him out of his seat. he thinks: wow. INCREDIBILE! what a sound. what a deal! i should trash the other shit. useless! after winding back five or six times for  'i maschi' he allows the tape go on and: BANG! "...bello, bello e impossibile..." salvatore takes all his other tapes and ZONK! out of the window...




the naplestapes front
the naples tapes back



by the way: salvatore is still happy about his gianna nannini tape, even though he  had to admit, that after 4 and a half hours of listening to these two songs he felt a bit disappointed about the rest. but just a bit. however, he arrived in our office with a big weird smile on his face, mumbling "bello bello" over and over, and during a slightly bumpy conversation he informed us about his failure and everything and we said: "hey pal, you are great, you did everything you could, good job!" and we cuddelded and snuggelled him tenderly to demonstrate our affection and to calm him down. and so we spent a few hours, hugging, and inventing funny pet names for each other like 'smoocher' or "cuddler" and such sweet things. then the whole thing went - kind of - more sensual, and at a very very cosy point of exchanging interpersonal tendernesses, someone stumbled across somebody other... and BADADONG! we kissed the ground. after a short phase of asking around if somebody had been hurt (fortunately nobody!) we laughed out loud and started over to cuddle each other again till sombody shouted: look! there! the garbage corner*! there we recognized that our garbage corner wasn't just a corner, in fact, by-and-by we had built a real tower out of our waste. and now due to the vibrations caused by our 'accident' it was threateningly wavering! somebody said: "quiet, don't move! maybe it will stop that way?!". and so we did. better: so we tried. salvatore wasn't yet down from his gianna nannini trip! now, that there wasn't any deflection by our tendernesses, he became anxious. we could see his swell green eyes starting to flutter around. then he began to sweat. and as somebody caughed silently, salvatore couldn't stand it one second more, he sang, he shouted out loud:

'BELLO, BELLO E IMPOSSIBILE
NA-NAA-NA

NA-NA-NAA
NA-NA-NA
NA-NA-NA-NAA'**

-------->ZWOSCH!!!
an avalanche of waste went down on us. after ten seconds of being puzzled we had to laugh out loud again. we laughed and laughed. suddenly salvatore said: wait a moment, what's this? he jumped up, ran to the corner and dug into the waste. a few moments later he came back (we were still laughing because somebody had started to tell funny jokes about a guy walking around without recognizing that he's just wearing one half of his sunglasses) and smiled triumphantly: ha! look at this, my beloved buddies! he held a box in his hand, and on it we read:

cryin' mice - the naples tapes

in it we found a broken cassette recorder and four tapes. and one track on every tape. wow. we said: good job salvatore, you are such a good guy. we started to cuddle him and each other and the rest of the day was devotet to our endless joy about the unexpected discovery of four more unbelievably raw, flat mice tracks, the way we like it. afterwards we filed them under n, and are now searching for the satanic split files, and the spoiling berlin sessions. but unfortunately it looks like if they arent being hidden in our waste. somebody should pack somebodies bags...
1. francobolli                                 GIMME!
2. gianturco                                   GIMME!
3. roosveltova  2001                    GIMME!
4. oh my god, am i too fat?        GIMME!




*the garbage corner is a ca. 3m x 3m  space reserved for old packages, old nespapers and magazines, pet-bottles, cigarette butts etc.: garbage. our office is fortunately wide enough so we can afford such a luxury. we decided to solve our garbage-problem this way after noumerous annoying discussions about who and when, the frequency of cleaning up... you can imagine....just dump your waste in the corner...
**con gli occhi neri e il tuo sapor mediorientale