Victor, you were
born in Angola from a Portuguese family. What was it
like growing up in Angola?
I was born 43 years ago so things were quite
different then. Angola was under colonialist domination
under the fascist regime of Salzar that oppressed both
Angolans and Portuguese. I grew up in the subsequent
transitional period that saw Angola through the independence
into a Marxist Leninist kind of regime adapted to the
African realities. We were then invaded by the apartheid
regime of South Africa in the late 70s, a time when
countries like the USA and Britain were still supportive
of that obscene order of things. So the result was fierce
battles in a cold war era, hidden wars that torn the
whole infrastructure apart, a total mess, driven by
the western philosophical models of society, democracy
and religion.
How did you come to develop an interest in
music?
I have always felt that drive for music and
pure sound or however you can define music when you
are still in a state of almost embryonic existence of
the mind. I would travel with my uncle to the interior
of the country in a truck and would get stuck in a state
of almost trance, listening to the noise of the engine
combined with the image of the road drifting under the
truck almost in a kind of vortex.
When I was six, I saw for the first time a man play
a live instrument. He was an old fisherman playing a
Hungo, a musical bow, like the berimbau (a one string
Afro-Brazilian bow originating from Angola) and again
I had that same sensation of trance. That sound triggered
some kind of ancient memory in my brain and I just had
to try myself to make sound, music or whatever.
As well as music from your native country,
did you have access to European and American music when
growing up, and how did it influence your work?
Yes, my hero when I was ten was Jimi Hendrix
and until I got my hands on an electric guitar, I would
hardly sleep, and that took me almost four years. I
listened to everything from great bands from Zaire and
Angola to Deep Purple, Ten Years After, Emerson Lake
and Palmer, Pink Floyd, etc...
Is music an important part of Angolan culture?
Music is an important part of existence there, it´s
like beer in England, everyone has some kind of involvement
in music although many don’t play an instrument.
Music has a spiritual function as well. It is present
in every form of ritual and spiritual experience, particularly
the possession of spirits, trance and things like that.
What drove you to build your own instruments?
Probably the fact that I didn’t have a guitar
immediately available, I started making sound with whatever
I found at home. I found out later that the drive for
music, for the experience of self through music and
sound form makes people create the tools for that experience
to be effective. So it seemed quite logical and spontaneous
to me that the construction process of the instrument
was part of that experience.
Are these instruments in keeping with traditional
Angolan musical instruments?
In a way yes, because they responded to my immediate
environment, but I believe that there are no traditional
instruments. Instead you have mechanisms that are passed
on from region to region throughout the planet and end
up almost coincidentally somewhere where they then are
considered traditional for some reason.
Can you take us through the process of building
a new instrument?
I compose my music by starting with nothing, so obviously
the first thing to do is to build the tool. What happens
is that the composition process is therefore a longer
process that requires a greater involvement from the
composer. You have to cut the wood, or the metal, you
bruise yourself, you sweat, and then you find a tuning
system, then you discover how it works and start recording,
then you rebuild the whole thing and the process can
go on for years before you even have a reasonable piece
that you can call a composition. So I don’t sit
down and draw a nice instrument. The form is also part
of making music, a way of getting there.
How long does it take you to fully develop
an instrument?
Years, and yet it’s never fully developed.
What exactly is PangeiArt?
PangeiArt is just a legal structure to frame the projects
I work on, a way of getting subsidies and publishing
my work, and now the work of collaboraters and of composers
in the rural areas in Angola. It´s a cultural
association with other musicians and thinkers, investigators
and friends. It has a non-profitable nature and I access
mainly foundations and cultural institutions like ministries.
You travel around the world a lot to promote
the PangeiArt project. Has that lead you to mix elements
of other cultures in your work?
I travel on those projects that are represented by PangeiArt,
like the Pangeia Instrumentos project, the
Odantalan project and now more recently the
Tsikaya project.
You’ve also published a book to accompany
the exhibitions and workshops, which includes contributions
from a wide range of people.
Yes, the book is called Pangeia Instrumentos: Permanent
Reconstructionism. The idea of the book is to illustrate
the process that drives people into a creative constructive
cycle as opposed to a creative destructive cycle. It
means that anyone can almost unnoticeably be driven
into a cycle that is creative with destructive outcomes.
The creative constructive cycle is creative but requires
people to carefully assess what is the outcome of their
creativity. And then the book tries to approach the
idea that you need to permanently sustain that cycle
of creative constructiveness.
Pangeia Instrumentos is released through
Rephlex in Europe. How did you come to work with them?
I had recorded the Pangeia Instruments by myself
in a little village by the coast of Sintra in Portugal
three years ago. There was a contact in London through
the Gulbenkian Foundation, Miguel Santos, who was starting
to put up a festival of Portuguese music, the Atlantic
Waves festival and I travelled to London on an occasion
and met him and then met some more people including
Joana, also a Poruguese girl who had moved to London
several years ago. She suggested me to send her some
CDs and we were in contact be mail ever since. One day
she told me Rephlex was interested in releasing the
album, so we went ahead and almost two years later the
CD is here.
Would you be tempted to work with some of their
artists and confront your work with that of musicians
using electronic instruments?
Definitely because the process is I guess the same.
They have almost surely been driven to music by the
same kind of impulses, and electronic music provides
them with a kind of non-conservative way of building
their own sound tools. They are tuning into the same
kind of timelessness memory of sound and self-expression
that allows them to manifest form through sound.
There is a tradition of African music in Europe,
but not so much in the UK where it seems to be more
difficult for African musician to get noticed. Is it
something you considered before working with Rephlex?
Not at all, I don’t consider the difficulties
of working in music or whether music can be divided
into African or European. There are structures that
condition oneself to behave in a certain way, like traffic
lights, you only walk when it’s green, which is
ok, a way of organization, but in music you don’t
have to stick to these strict boundaries, you can and
must walk when it’s red, so African becomes European
becomes Asian etc...
You’ve previously released an album called
Oceanites Erraticus, in which you collaborated
with a number of people. The project seemed rather different
from Pangeia Instrumentos. Could you tell us
about it?
It´s my guitar work which is actually my first
instrument and the one I have been playing for ages
now. I play a 12 string acoustic with a number of tunings
that vary a lot.
How did the project start?
Oceanites Erraticus is a whole story. I created
a sort of geo fiction of an island called Aisa Tanaf
on a planet called Egnalam. The planet has some sort
of life that manifests itself via the dreams of people
who come in contact with it. So there is a map of the
island and a booklet with pictures of the planet. I
worked with a photographer who is a kind of alchemist
and does amazing work with growing crystals and then
photograph them. I tend to think that he is in fact
travelling to far away planets and bringing back some
data in the form of pictures.
You’ve also taken part in a project of
cultural exchange, Odantalan, that brought
artists from around the world together, and the result
was an album. Were you at the origin of the project,
and was it easy to get other musicians on board?
Yes, I initiated the Odantalan project,
which has at the core of the creative process the ancient
writing systems from the Kongo civilisation. This was
and still is used as a form of written communication
with the spirit of the ancestors. So what we were trying
to do on the project is to create a space of work where
we wouldn’t be conditioned by anything else but
those kinds of knowledge systems. The result was a great
CD and a book with strong design component and historical
and linguistic perspective.
What was the purpose of the project?
To use those knowledge systems as a launchpad
into a whole new territory of visual and sound forms.
How are you perceived by other Angolan musicians
and by the Angolan public?
As someone who is experimenting I guess.
You are coming to London in December for a
series of activities and workshops, and you will also
be performing. What can people expect? Can anyone take
part?
The exhibition was unfortunately postponed for a later
date, but the concert will go ahead with Max Eastley
and Heitor Alvelos, I hope. It is now scheduled for
the ICA on the 6th of December.
What’s next for you? Do you have other projects
on the go at the moment?
The next project is Odantalan in Salvador Da
Bahia next year and the Tsikaya project of
recording composers who have been isolated in the heart
Angola during all these years of war. Now things are
quiet and its possible to go in. They have amazing things
to show us and teach us. I have also started working
on the new album where I will be working exclusively
with new instruments.
Email interview September 2003
Thank you to Victor and Marcus
|
