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LAYING DEMONS TO REST

a storytelling. always anew. vital. brisk. unpolluted. wholesome. defiant.
a record. revisited by the same ears unfolds a new story ever again.
each time demons occur. and we put them to rest. with sounds. with open hearts.
with a guitar. with a trumpet. with an OP1. the wish of telling the story with more colours, with an expanded sound world, with the possibility of more possibilities, led me to use the OP1 as a source of magic sonorous potentialities. samples. loops. effects. a new window into the unknown.

Fred Frith and The Journey Home

It is important to say that the journey never ends. Every now (and then) you get home, but you keep on walking. You find home in so many places, in so many precious souls. Home is the way and hopefully the way will always bring you home. I always felt restless. Wandering through life trying to find the Way, or some kind of way to keep walking. I never seemed to fit, I was always a stranger in someone else’s home. Not always a stranger perhaps… but always a foreigner at least, or so I thought. I actually realised, later on, that being a foreigner can be a rich experience.
I felt I was not meant to belong anywhere really but, at least, I needed some light to show me the path I was meant to follow. I hit my head many times in closed doors, I tried very hard to fit worlds I did not belong to, I tried to speak other people’s language but did not managed to be understood. Nor to be myself. What a crazy thing, to try to be someone else! And yet, for a while, I thought that might be the way.
So, determined to try to be someone else and try to fit, I failed. I failed many times and, for each single time, I punished myself for failing. And I was not getting anywhere really and, most of all, I was not happy and playing music was many times meaningless and boring.
In 2011, the year before my whole life changed radically, I was invited by the Serralves Museum in Porto, as a local musician, to participate in a workshop where I would work and perform with Fred Frith. I did not know that much about this Fred Frith so I googled him and listened to some of his stuff, probably Henry Cow, Zorn’s Naked City, his Guitar Solos album, among other bands and recordings. I remember watching the documentary A Step Across the Border and getting very inspired and thinking that this guy was really cool!
After many years of wandering and searching I felt that something exciting was waiting for me out there and I could smell it in the distance and hear its calling. I could not see it clearly yet, I was still trying to fit but it surely felt different. Those hours spent playing music under his mentorship gave me a hint of what all of this could be about! Music, yes! But not only that… it actually made me see beyond music, it was also about life itself, about identity, community, freedom and honesty.
Improvised music! Important things to do while playing this music: listen very carefully to what is happening and being played, don’t be afraid to fail, be yourself, play freely, be aware of the other musicians, the music is the most important, be selfless, have fun. Was this mentioned then or is it only my perception now? Or was it then? Does it matter? I was thrilled! And that inspirational meeting truly made me walk the walk that I have been walking to this day.
After this encounter, where for a brief moment I felt freed from the restrains of classical and jazz musics, I wanted more. More freedom, more meaning in my music, more fulfillment playing music, more fun and more truth in what I was saying through my music and so the journey home started. In 2012 I left my old life, I broke some old and heavy chains that where imprisoning me and I started to walk, full of hope in the future and filled of joy. Joy that comes and goes at its own will but hope that promises to never let me down.
Slowly, this new journey of mine started to unfold and in 2015 I received an email from Fred Frith inviting me to play with him at the Biennale für Moderne Musik Frankfurt Rhein Main. It was a project, called Ta Ta Ta, with musicians from the Frankfurt Radio Big Band plus Fred, Lotte Anker, Okkyung Lee, Christine Wodraszka and me as soloists, and Heike Liss on real-time visuals. At the time this was a big thing for me and an honor to be invited by a musician with such long and rich musical path and immense artistry. I got overwhelmed with this invitation and super excited to join the project with such great improvisers. But I was also anxious and nervous and I felt the weight of some sort of responsibility to play in such a context. But right on the first rehearsal, home was waiting for me. The feeling of being insecure completely vanished and I did not try to fit or be anyone else. I was only me and I was everything I needed to be. There was no past nor future. I enjoyed every single moment.
What I have been learning from Fred since my first encounter with him and through the concerts we have been playing together, in different projects and constellations, is that everything is possible. There’s nothing that can’t be used if it serves the music. There are no rules or preconceptions, a melody is just as welcome as a noise, a groove as interesting as a texture and if a bird sings… well, probably nothing would fit better the music being created. Music is music, and everything can be music. It only depends on how we listen.
Fred has a lovely curiosity about what happens around him and a willingness to embrace the younger generations and share home, that place where we all meet when we let everything else go, including ourselves.
The sharing is, from my perspective, a big important part of being human. To share the stage and the music in this way as when we improvise open heartedly, is a very intimate and fascinating thing.
Recently me and Fred played a duo concert in Mulhouse, France. It was beautiful, and a wild ride as he put it! We don’t really know how we did it…well, I never really know how I do it! It just comes from a place that you can only reach when you let everything else go, your ego, your wishes and desires, your thoughts, your preconceived ideas. It’s like the music is already floating around in space, timeless, and in the right moment you grab it and put it out in the world again, filtered by who you are. And when you are there on stage, naked, there’s this fragility that is such a beautiful aspect of our human nature. This impermanent nature which all of us and all things have, that makes the act of improvising the most natural way of existing and being in the world. As soon as we ground ourselves, life shows us we need to move on.
If you get stuck in your ideas, music will stop flowing. You need to grab what is there for you, in that right moment in time. Every time, every moment, every now. And that’s the beauty of playing this music!
In 2019, Fred invited me to play some concerts at The Stone in New York followed by an east coast tour with his trio featuring Jason Hoopes and Jordan Glenn plus Heike Liss on visuals. After an amazing time spent on stage and on the road, the last concert at Rhizome in Washington D.C. was truly a transcendental experience for me. It was the only time I felt this in such an extreme way. Rhizome is a great community space for experimental arts. The place was packed, the first row was only some centimeters away from the musicians on stage. The room was boiling with energy. And it was loud and super intense at times! My whole body was experiencing the music and the sound and I was enjoying it! But for a moment I stopped feeling my body. I was not in my body anymore, I was out there suspended in time and space looking at myself on stage, I could see my fingers move but I was not really moving them. It was overwhelming and unbelievable. When the concert was over I ran out of the door and around the block as I could not hold all the energy I had inside myself. It sounds like a bad movie about enlightenment or something like that but… what can I say?! It happened to me! If I could only get to that place every time I play music! But as I said before, the joy comes and goes but the hope keeps me searching and walking the walk!

– text commissioned by John Chantler for the book People & Places, Fönstret #3, Edition Festival for Other Music –