Here's the article published on the italian magazine Blow Up last January, roughly translated into English. I omitted most of the parts by the interviewer because they're unnecessarily pompous and useless (think The Wire, in fact this magazine shares the same graphic design.)
"Everything started in the post-punk period, i was very impressed by that music and like other people leaning towards electronic music, especially German, i started to discover noisier things, Throbbing Gristle and the likes. Then Ramleh, Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound came, these are the bands that influenced me the most. Stapleton's most recent things are surely very different, but i saw NWW at the time of "Chance Meeting.." and they were great then, like Whitehouse that i saw in Paris, twenty-seven minutes of power electronics cranked to the maximum, seminal boosts that provoked in me the reaction of actually trying to do something.
But there was no technique and i didn't own a synth, i didn't have anything, just a tape recorder, a jack cable and that's it. The tools were very rudimental and i didn't know anything about electronics, with simple cables i tried to do some tapes and they seemed good to me. After I listened to "Symphony For A Genocide" from the great Maurizio Bianchi for the first time and I started to have contacts with different people i met with Maurizio, who found my things not bad and invited me to send a tape to Gary Mundy of Broken Flag and that's where everything started.
It was gary Mundy, who released "Conflict" on Broken Flag, to choose the name Mauthausen Orchestra. To think about it nowadays the result was so-so, i don't want to deny what i did because i still like tapes like "Bloodyminded" or "Mafarka" but it was music that was fitting at the time, now a bit less."
So from his refuge and basic homemade studio in Quincinetto, Pierpaolo manages to leave very relevant tract in the area not only for who followed industrial in those years:
"I'm in the Torino province, in a town of eleven hundred people, isolated, but this never prevented me to take interest in some things from the beginning since i was very young when i started Mauthausen Orchestra, i was seventeen. My first experiments were never published, i sent them to some people i no longer remember, but they continue to be distributed to this day. We did tapes because doing vinyl was unthinkable, in the first half of the eighties there was interest and creativity, then i stopped experimenting because there were too many people doing this stuff."
Regarding aesthetics:
"There was a need to do something more other than the music that was produced, and regarding the image language, the concept, let's call them this way, there was the necessity to use provocations to give more sense, also visual, to the music. I must say that my friend Andrea Cernotto from The Sodality was handling the cover artworks, and with him i founded the Aquilifer Sodality, a sort of label on which we released almost only tapes, like "Hate's Our Belief", a compilation with Sutcliffe Jugend, Consumer Electronics, Die Form, DDAA, P16.D4, Maurizio Bianchi, Bourbonese Qualk, Krang."
M.O.'s brutalities were not forgotten with his retirement from the scenes, and there were several epigones that directly cited him as influence, and not only in words. Like it was for Juntaro Yamanouchi of The Gerogerigegege and Marco Corbelli.
"Juntaro was very into my music and decided to release an album in 500 copies, "Five Years Of Slaughter" on his Vis A Vis label in 1990, where excerpts from my tapes are collected. Naturally these contacts happened through letters, there were no internet and no mobile phones, and likewise i got a letter from Marco Corbelli, where he asked me to reissue all my tapes in a box set on his Slaughter Productions, in a limited edition of 100 copies, called "Gravitational Arch Of Sex". I abandoned music because i found that there was already too much stuff going on in mid-80s, i didn't have any more energy and motives to go on, but Corbelli's release gave me the will to start again. He was my fan, and i also thought his material was good, so we kept in touch until he died, he also came to visit me three or four times. The box set, released in 1995, was a big success, and it was a great project that permitted the re-discovery of my work. A copy happened to get to the U.S.A. and Bloodlust! contacted me because they wanted to release a CD with new material by me. This gave me yet another stimulus to start again and in two weeks i recorded "Raising Vapours".
That CD from 1997, more releases in '99, "Lost In Boyz Town" and the 10" "Kiss The Carpet" seem to anticipate a continuative second era for Pierpaolo's project but they didn't have any follow up until 2006 when two more singles where released, "Smooth Hate" and "Forbidden Ground", and the CD "Where Are We Going?" in 2008. It was then the close association with Silentes that was the true boost for Mauthausen Orchestra's rebirth:
"For a certain period i stopped because i moved to France for work. In the meantime i got many proposals to reissue the tapes on CD, but i always declined because i thought that the material had been already exploited, and i was thinking about other things. Then I met Stefano Gentile of Silentes who wanted to do the same thing, but together we preferred to prepare a compilation with past tracks, "Sonic Deprivation" and in addition to releasing new Mauthausen Orchestra albums i started to collaborate with Gianluca Favaron and Giuseppe Verticchio. The new direction is different, there's need of other music, i think that there's some lack of creativity around, and that with new technologies everybody is good to go, you only need a computer, there's too much stuff.
I never used technology, feelings were enough.
I didn't use any instruments, i only had a jack connected to the stereo, and to make the material of those tapes i burnt lots of amps and speakers. I wanted to give a new life to the name because the music changed, the ideas changed, back then there was much will to transgress, we were very young and much more crazy, now age and mentality are different, there's always the will to experiment but with another spirit. What i'm doing now is a lot more calm and meditative, there's more quiet, i like the sounds much more and obviously there are other techniques."
"The tapes circulated a lot and i participated in lots of compilations, some of which i don't even remember, occasionally i see my original tapes sold for hundreds of euro and lots of bootlegs, also on vinyl. They have to be considered bootlegs, after our agreements weren't respected, the two records released by Trash Ritual, "Vernichtung" and "They Never Learn", i didn't get any copy of the latter, and the "Anal Perversions" vinyl, of which i ignore the source and I got five copies from an unknown sender (there was no sender on the envelope). I never had any economic regrets though, the English scene was almost a business while we were always more isolated, i think that none of us got much money out of this, but i never cared. The only person who offered me money was Frank Maier from Vinyl On Demand ,when he realized the Broken Flag box-set, but i declined the offer preferring to have some copy of the set to give to friends."
