How incredible is it for a new band to be playing psychedelic rock? How unlikely does it seem for contemporary artists to express themselves through a psychedelic lens? And yet, Messiness is a band fully devoted to psychedelic rock, truly captivating us with the trippy, imaginative visions of their founder and driving force, Max Raffa. Myth of Rock, blown away by the angular, vibrant kaleidoscope that is Messiness, sat down with Max for a conversation. His strange and fascinating answers proved beyond doubt that he is an extraordinary mind and a larger-than-life rock ’n’ roll persona. Proceed at your own discretion!
by Dimitris Zacharopoulos
How was Messiness formed? Give us a short biography of the band.
We were fooooormed in a crossfire hurricane. Somewhere in the Milan underground, between damp rehearsal rooms, bad wiring, and worse ideas, a small motley crew of freaks started colliding. Different backgrounds, incompatible instincts, too much volume, not enough common sense. The kind of environment where nothing should work and somehow does. Messiness grew out of that chaos. No master plan, just a shared intolerance for boredom. Over time the noise learned how to stand upright, the songs learned how to survive, and the band learned how to move together. And it’s all right now.
You’ve travelled around Europe playing rock’n’roll before forming Messiness. What did those years teach you?
Those years taught me that Europe looks romantic only from a distance. Up close it is petrol stations at dawn, broken vans, wrong addresses, and promoters who disappear the moment the lights go out. You learn how little you actually need, how much humiliation you can metabolise, and how long belief can survive without evidence. I learned that stages are temporary shelters. That crowds come and go, and the only thing that stays with you is the damage you convert into momentum. By the end of it, music stopped feeling like a dream and started behaving like a compulsion. Once that happens, there is no turning back.
You have just released your debut album. How do you feel about that?
It feels great and completely absurd at the same time. The real difficulty is not making the music. It’s getting noticed in a system that actively rewards mediocrity because mediocrity behaves, fits formats, and never asks for attention. We live in an era where being inoffensive is confused with being good, and visibility has very little to do with intensity or risk. So putting out a record like this feels like throwing a lit match into a swimming pool. You know it should cause trouble. Instead, people ask if it comes in a safer version. Still, the album exists, and that already feels like a small act of sabotage.
Give us all the details about the recordings and the production/mixing/mastering of the “Messiness” album.
The album was produced with Ivan Rossi, who is an exceptional producer with a deep understanding of sound, patience, and danger. He works with an incredible analogue setup, and that shaped everything. We spent a lot of time working with analog synthesizers like Buchla, Moog, Roland systems, modular synths, alongside first-rate instruments and amps. Everything was chosen for character, not convenience. I wanted the record to carry the sense of magic you associate with older recordings, when sound felt physical and unpredictable, but without falling into nostalgia or fake vintage fetishism. A lot of bands aim for a philological reconstruction of the past. That never interested me. The goal was to sound alive, powerful, and fully contemporary, while still letting the accidents remain audible. Production, mixing, and mastering were all about balance. Keeping the warmth and instability of analogue processes while pushing the sound forward, aligned with the current state of the art. Not clean, not retro, not polite. Something that feels crafted with old spells and modern instincts at the same time.
Your debut album is a kaleidoscope of styles and ideas. How would you define your music?
Calling it a kaleidoscope is accurate, but still a bit polite. I think of our music as a system in constant motion. It absorbs styles, ideas, histories, and moods, then spins them until their original roles dissolve and new meanings start leaking out. Rock, pop, psychedelia, noise, melody, ritual, irony, excess. They all coexist without a clear hierarchy. The music moves the way thought moves when it accelerates. Fast, contradictory, euphoric, ridiculous, occasionally violent, often funny. It is physical and conceptual at the same time. You can dance to it, overthink it, or get lost inside it, sometimes all within the same track. If I had to define it, I would say it is music that treats confusion as fuel and ambition as a basic requirement. Loud enough to register in the body, strange enough to unsettle the mind, alive enough to keep changing shape. The kind of sound that exists outside instruction manuals, which usually means it is doing something right.
Which were your music influences while growing up? Do you listen to new bands today?
Discovering rock’n’roll as a child changed everything. Hearing Little Richard felt like someone tearing a hole in reality. After that came the Beatles, still my favourite band, which opened an entire universe of form, ambition, and possibility. Jefferson Airplane expanded the horizon further, showing how music could dissolve into vision and collective imagination. The Clash taught me urgency and consequence. Sonic Youth taught me that sound itself could become a world. Each discovery felt like entering a new territory with its own rules and dangers. For years I was deeply drawn to the avant-gardes and to the naive, sometimes reckless ways they collided with pop. That innocence still matters to me. There was courage in trying things without knowing where they would land. I don’t listen to much contemporary music. Too much of it feels careful, aligned, afraid of its own shadow. I spend more time with non-Western musical traditions and with the past. There is an overwhelming amount of courage, invention, and risk already there, far more than in a present that often confuses caution with relevance.
The album was recorded entirely on analogue equipment. What does analogue give you that digital can’t?
Analogue introduces gravity into sound. It behaves like matter, not like information. Voltage drifts, components heat up, circuits remember what happened a few seconds ago. Cause and effect stop being perfectly obedient. Every signal carries a small history of its own mistakes. That accumulation produces meaning. Digital systems operate on idealised time. Everything is reversible, recallable, infinitely correctable. Analogue systems age while you are using them. They resist. They respond differently at 3 a.m. than they did at noon. From a physical point of view, analogue accepts entropy instead of fighting it. From a philosophical one, it accepts that control is always partial. This matters because most contemporary culture is obsessed with frictionless optimisation. Clean data, clean edits, clean outcomes. Analogue introduces noise as a form of knowledge. It exposes the fantasy of total control for what it is. A superstition with better marketing. So it’s all about allowing sound to behave like reality. Unstable, time-bound, slightly hostile. Once you hear that, it becomes very hard to go back to systems that pretend the world has no weight.
Max, you’re not just a musician but also a writer and sociologist. How does your academic perspective shapes the band’s artistic direction?
My academic work and my music follow different logics, and that difference is crucial. Research demands coherence, precision, and responsibility toward evidence. It forces you to be careful, to justify every step, to control ambiguity. Rock music offers the opposite condition, and that’s exactly why it matters to me. Music is the space where I allow myself to be instinctive, intuitive, and even wrong. It’s where thought can appear in an unfinished, excessive, or immature form. Science can’t afford that kind of irresponsibility. Art can and must. Rock music in particular allows ideas to surface before they’ve been disciplined by method or language. It gives form to impulses, contradictions, and affects that theory would either smooth out or postpone. In that sense, music becomes a testing ground for thoughts that are not yet ready to behave. Research trains you to see structures, power relations, invisible rules. Music making is where those structures get embodied, exaggerated, and sometimes ridiculed. The band’s artistic direction emerges from this tension as an embodied, noisy way of thinking that accepts error, excess, and emotional risk as part of its intelligence.
There’s a strong social critique running through the record. Which theme felt the most urgent for you to address?
What felt urgent was exposing how power now hides behind friendliness. The record goes after that fake progressive atmosphere where everything is branded as inclusive, mindful, ethical, while the same machinery keeps grinding people down. Neoliberalism no longer shouts. It smiles, asks how you’re feeling, then invoices your exhaustion. Messiness is angry at optimisation disguised as care, at dissent turned into merchandise, at empathy reduced to a campaign slogan. It reacts by choosing overload instead of moderation, uselessness instead of productivity, noise instead of clarity. These are not aesthetic choices. They are refusals. Ways of breaking the spell. The album is hostile to the idea that progress means becoming more efficient, more flexible, more reasonable. It documents what happens when that promise collapses and people start sabotaging it from the inside, through boredom, excess, pleasure, and disobedient time. No solutions, no redemption arcs. Just a clear rejection of a system that wants everything smooth, measurable, and empty, and a loud insistence on staying messy until it breaks.
The mix of Mellotron, oud, shawm, saxophone, theremin, and electronics is wild — how do you decide when a track needs something so unconventional?
Those instruments were never chosen for colour or exoticism. They’re all technologies of breath, vibration, or haunted electricity. Ancient and futuristic at the same time. The Mellotron already sounds like memory decomposing. The oud and shawm carry centuries of ritual, dust, and outdoor air. Saxophone and theremin sit on the edge between body and abstraction. Electronics smear everything until the borders stop making sense. Putting them together felt natural, as it mirrors how we actually live, surrounded by incompatible timelines and cultural leftovers all playing at once. The goal was not really fusion, but more friction, more the idea of letting instruments from different histories argue in the same room until something unstable, physical, and alive emerged.
What was the most experimental moment in the studio, the one where you thought, “This might be too far” — and then kept it anyway?
Every moment. We had that thought so often it stopped meaning anything. At some point we realised that “this might be too far” was just our internal quality control giving up. That’s when we knew we were finally doing it right.
Your sound is both futuristic and nostalgic. Do you consciously chase that duality or does it just happen organically?
I experience it as a coincidence of trajectories. The future and the past are not opposites moving away from each other. They are two currents crossing the same point from different directions. I find myself standing there, listening. Certain sounds carry memory the way objects do. Others behave like hypotheses about what has not yet taken shape. When they meet, something happens that feels inevitable rather than intentional. The nostalgic element brings density, sediment, weight. The futuristic one introduces velocity and abstraction. Together they create a sense of time that is no longer linear but layered. So no, I don’t chase that duality. It’s simply the condition of working with sound while being aware that every gesture is already an archive and every experiment is immediately a ruin.
How does the chemistry change when the studio project transforms into the full live band on stage?
The chemistry flips completely because the project really exists on stage. The record is a compressed document, thirty-four minutes of material frozen in time. Live, those same songs become platforms. They open up, stretch, mutate, and sometimes disappear altogether. Nothing is fixed. Improvisation drives everything. Duration becomes elastic, structures loosen, decisions are made in real time. Our last performance using the same material ran for ninety minutes and still felt unfinished. That difference is the point. The studio captures a moment. The live band exposes the process. What happens on stage is where the project actually breathes. We’re basically a live band.
Your songs sit between narrative and atmosphere. Which comes first for you — the story or the mood?
For me neither comes first. What comes first is a problem. A tension that does not yet know how to speak. Narrative and atmosphere are two ways that tension tries to organise itself. Sometimes it condenses into images and situations and starts behaving like a story. Other times it spreads out, becomes temperature, density, volume, and never asks to be translated. I don’t decide which one wins. I wait until one of them becomes unavoidable. When that happens, the song writes itself around it, like a nervous system growing around a wound.
Güneş Akyürek’s artwork perfectly matches your sound. How involved were you in shaping Messiness’ visual identity?
Güneş’s role went far beyond visual contribution. He’s the founder of Tarla Records, but first and foremost he’s an artist with an extraordinary intuitive intelligence. His work carries a depth that comes from thinking through images in the same way one thinks through sound, time, and memory. From the very beginning, there was an immediate recognition, a shared sensibility rooted in a Mediterranean way of inhabiting the world, where history, ruin, light, and excess coexist without needing explanation. My involvement was intentionally limited because trust was total. I didn’t give him directions or constraints. I wanted his vision to move freely, knowing it would resonate with the record at a structural level. What came up feels like a parallel articulation of the same impulse. A form of brotherhood, intellectual and affective at once, where different languages converge without translation.
Your arrangements are incredibly detailed. How do you avoid overcrowding the music, when you’re layering so many sounds?
People have been telling me for years that I arrange too much. That was always the point. But for me arrangement is not decoration, it’s pressure. I like sounds rubbing against each other, ideas competing for oxygen, details refusing to stay in the background. The fear of emptiness feels healthier to me than the obsession with minimalism that dominates everything right now. That is the aesthetic of Silicon Valley. A culture that mistakes absence for intelligence and subtraction for depth. I come from somewhere else. I come from Sicily, from houses that are too furnished to be tasteful, from rooms filled with objects, colours, smells, memories. From tables laid for a feast even when there aren’t enough chairs. From a way of living where excess is a form of care.
How does a Messiness live show feel like from your perspective?
It feels like the best rock’n’roll show you can see right now. There’s no mystery there. The only real problem is that too many promoters are suckers and don’t give people the chance to find out. On stage it feels total If more rooms were willing to take a risk instead of recycling the same safe line-ups, this wouldn’t sound arrogant at all. It would sound obvious.
Now that the debut is out, where do you see Messiness evolving next — conceptually, musically, visually?
If I knew, it would already be a bad sign. Messiness only makes sense when it moves ahead of my understanding. The next step has to surprise me first, otherwise there’s no reason to take it.
What do you think of the use of AI in art and music?
Blimey, this is what I do for a living. All right, I’ll try to be brief and clear. AI operates within a regime of formal relations. Creativity, as it has been theorised across philosophy, phenomenology, and pragmatism, comes from situated experience, through encounter, resistance, and contingency. Artistic thought takes shape when an agent confronts something that doesn’t immediately submit to intention, like a material, a body, a social situation, a technical limit, an affective overload. What drives creation is a speculative leap enacted under uncertainty. An intuition precedes justification. Action comes before explanation. This process is inseparable from temporality, embodiment, and consequence. The maker is exposed to error, fatigue, misrecognition, and failure, and is transformed by the act of making itself. Meaning is not computed in advance but sedimented through practice. AI systems remain external to this phenomenological dimension. Their operations are insulated from resistance in the strong sense. They don’t encounter the world as something that answers back. They don’t revise themselves through lived failure or irreversible consequence. What appears as novelty is the recombination of stabilised patterns within a closed horizon of statistical correlations. Surprise exists only for the observer, not for the system. From an epistemological standpoint, this places AI-generated artefacts within a logic of reproduction. Creativity depends on being affected by what one does, negotiating uncertainty in real time, and inhabiting the risk of being wrong without guarantees of correction. Until a system can be situated, vulnerable, and altered by its own actions, it’s not creating. It’s rehearsing. Which is fine. Rehearsals are useful. You just don’t mistake them for the gig.
Send your message to the readers!
Never wear trainers and hoodies, because trainers and hoodies suck. Stay curious, stay excessive, distrust anything that looks too clean, and remember to applaud politely when it all gently collapses. Then ask for another drink. Possibly good wine.
