Words by Justin Turford

No stranger to our pages, the Anglo-Italian drummer, bass player, producer, composer and educator Dave De Rose is always making music. He released the twelfth album of his revolving doors collaborative project Agile Experiments in November of last year and has already let loose two releases in 2025 (including a twenty five track solo album!) and is due to release a new two tracker from his Rave At Your Fictional Borders outfit and we are delighted to video premiere one of the new tracks!

Always open to adventure and fresh musical friendships, the (then) two members of RAYFB headed to Morocco in September 2024 at the invitation of drummer and vocalist Salim Akki (Majid Bekkas, Urban Folklore) who had arranged a residency for them at Essouri Jamal's newly built L'Bridge recording studio in Kenitra. An instant connection took place as they hung out, a relationship amplifying as they played together, building up to recording two sessions a day and also performing together for two live shows in Casablanca and Rabat.

The first results of this new incarnation of RAYFB are ‘Entanglement’ and ‘Utopia’, two brand new pieces, composed, performed, recorded and filmed simultaneously. Pure improvisational groove energy between three musicians who remember, have only just met a few days earlier! There’s a palpable sense of joy in discovery between them in the video and one can justifiably be hyped about where this collaboration will go.

Now a trio, Rave At Your Fictional Borders seem to have found their equilibrium. Having assumed (incorrectly) that the project was another with Dave as conductor and boss, I sent him some questions which he has generously answered, pulling in the other voices of the triumvirate - proof if needed that they are finally settled.

Dave: I just want to clarify that this is not my project anymore, it’s a band. I had an initial idea for the name and the desire for trance-like state inducing music. I began to collaborate with Marius Mathiszik a lot, a German national who has been living in Greece for the past seven years or so. We began working for a project called Forest Binary (with Gustav Penka & Dimitris Kalousis) for which I co-produced a record. Then during the pandemic we tried to make another record over the internet with some jam recordings we’d previously captured. Some of these are unreleased at present (although I must say rather good!), others parts of those recordings were chopped up, over-produced and released under a new project name I Work in Communications. Marius is also on the latest Agile Experiments record ‘Loukoumades’ (None More Records) alongside the drummer and co-producer of Forest Binary, Gustav Penka.

Me and Marius became the stable members of Rave At Your Fictional Borders, not because we didn’t want a band but because it has been hard to find the right people that we wanted to be in a band with and (who) wanted to be in a band with us. So in the process of developing RAYFB we collaborated with a bunch of amazing musicians who have graced our previous three EPs: ‘National Phantom’, ‘Factualism’ and ‘Potion Trigger’.

Now, we’ve found Salim, and although he lives in Morocco, the band finally seems to make sense to its essence and name!

Now for your questions!! I asked Marius and Salim to contribute here and there.

JT: An Anglo-Italian living between Rome, London and Greece. Where are you today?

Dave: Well actually, living in between these three is quite accurate, I’m still doing all my life in all those locations!

JT: It’s your third release of 2025 under three different names and it's only Feb/March - what’s the rush?

Dave: Haha, the world is about to end and we’re all going to die very soon aren’t we? Actually, I'm just completely addicted to music making. I have a few other records on my hard drive, two of which need finishing, the others need releasing, it’s all in the pipeline. I'm compartmentalizing the style of recordings into different names.

In the case of RAYFB, we’re releasing this two track EP as a teaser to the album that comes out later in the year. As you know we need releases to do shows, so, as much as we’re excited for the world to hear the music we’ve made, out of necessity the timings are in place so as to be able to organise performances. This release comes with live footage of real in-the-moment live performance and composition of the pieces so it should serve as a real showcase of what we can offer to a live show.

JT: You are equally known as a drummer and bassist - quite a unique scenario! How do you choose what you are going to focus on when creating a new collaborative project? I mean, your choices for guest drummers are always pretty spectacular but most drummers would choose themselves!

Dave: That’s very kind and thank you! I’ve been playing drums for thirty four years and bass for ten. Actually, I felt like I had come to the end of my path with music ten years ago, so I went to Birkbeck University to study counselling. It was wonderful but very intense so in the summer holidays after the first year I decided to play bass as a distraction… it pulled me back in! It has been the greatest gift the universe has given me. Now, if given the choice I would always play bass, it’s my number one love, especially being that I have the opportunity to play with such amazing drummers. Drummers are the most valuable artists in a band, what’s changed is that I want to be with them not be them.

JT: Tell us about the formation and journey of Rave At Fictional Borders.

Dave: As I mentioned earlier, Rave At Your Fictional Borders started with the name. I had this name and I wanted to make a political statement with some kind of live rave music. I didn’t want it to be what is normally associated with rave music though, I wanted to expand the term to encompass any genre that could be enjoyed in a rave environment. If you look at what Dan Nicholls and Louise Boer started to do with Free Movements in London five or six years ago, you can see where it all came from.

Marius: Me and Dave met in Athens in 2019 and have been working together for some years to form an outlet that combines our common interest in rhythmic layering, avant-garde and Noise. As I see it the goal was to create music that sounds fresh and spiky in the ears of the listener but makes them dance and bang their heads rather than pushing them away.

We have tried with different drummers in the past and occasional additions of sound artists as well, and we have released several singles along with the successful EP ‘Potion Trigger’ that had Jon Scott guest-appearing on drums.

Salim Akki used to follow Dave’s projects for a while. When I was travelling in Morocco in March 2024, I met him and we got along really well. Already in September, I told Dave he should meet him too so we returned to Morocco together to record with Salim and play a couple of shows.

Salim is a virtuous and yet humble player with a great sense of pulse and an amazing feel informed by traditional Moroccan music, but shares our love for electronic music at the same time, making him the perfect fit for our powerful trio.

JT: Dave, your musical and real life seem to clash against the idea of borders (even the name of this project) - your inter-nationality (inner nationality?), your multi-instrumentalist career - liminal in many ways, neither here nor there or everywhere at once? Do you think this is why you are attracted to improvisational music in particular?

Dave: That’s an interesting question! All my life when I was in Rome I was the English kid, then when I moved to London, I was the Italian guy. I never grew close to either national identity - unless we’re talking about pizza and pasta rules - and always used to refer to myself as a world citizen. I say used to because some years ago I started to refer to myself as a conglomerate of particles pertaining to the universe - currently experiencing life in human form.

There was a brief version of RAYFB last year where we took our improvised recordings and used them to build compositions we would perform as written with a little room to wiggle. Yes, we had a set list and yes, we knew we could call on a certain type of shape for the set but it sucked the life out of us. The excitement that comes with absolute freedom has no borders, and that’s the way life should be in and outside music.

JT: Who inspires you musically and non-musically?

Salim: I think growing up in Morocco, my culture inspired me on a subliminal level. As a child I was playing everywhere, always tapping on the table during dinner, annoying my family with my Shabi rhythms. Back then I didn't know that I had these things in my blood, but once I grew up, from my teens onward, I started to feel that I had something within me. I live in a country where there are lots of rhythms and my culture gave them to me.

Marius: I draw from the warmth and transcendental quality of Alice Coltrane’s music, the trance-inducing quality of repetition as found in New York minimalism and contemporary electronica, the ‘curious but calm attitude towards the world’ physicists such as Richard Feynman or Carlo Rovelli share (or have shared) as well as tiny moments of myth and wonder one can find when closely observing nature.

Dave: I am inspired by the music of the past with a love that won’t let me replicate it. And I guess I know who said similar things: Miles Davis. So that’s a big one for me. I’d say 70s’ Stevie Wonder records are my favorites but obviously there’s a lot more.

Non-musically I’m very much inspired by people around me, my partner is an amazing human being, many non-famous people with good will are doing good, just in their own neighborhood. They say we’re heading in that direction now, small communities. I’m looking at the real people around me a lot these days for positive action.

JT: I seem to spend a lot of time trying to find the vocabulary to define the hard-to-define and your output is certainly in that world. Outside of session work or performing with more genre-defined artists, do you have any plans for more genre-specific projects?

Dave: It’s that thing from the previous question, I want to, I love to, I wish I could be in a soul/funk 70s’ band but I feel like I could only justify it if I was playing in a hotel lobby, or on a cruise ship see? Maybe there’s a way, maybe one day I’ll find a way to make it look to the past enough to not be a mash of all things and yet be original and justified to stand up as original music of post 2025. Or maybe we'll figure out time travel and I'll permanently go and live in the 1970s.

Utopia / Entanglement will be released on Dave De Rose Records on 07/03/2025 and will be available on all common streaming platforms, high/quality download on Bandcamp plus a limited number of Lathe Cut Vinyl available upon demand pre-order only.

Eventually live URL: https://davederosemusic.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement-utopia