Published
Name: Amuleto Apotropaico
Nationality: Portuguese
Recent release: Amuleto Apotropaico's new album Língua Espúria, featuring Francisco Pedro Oliveira, is out via Perf.
Hometown Recommendation: Hotelier. You’ll find all kinds of interesting performances, nice people and great food.
If you enjoyed this António Feiteira interview and would like to find out more about his music, visit Amuleto Apotropaico on Instagram, and bandcamp.
When did you first consciously start getting interested in musical improvisation? What was your first improvisation on stage or in the studio and what was the experience like?
I think improvisation comes naturally as part of playing any kind of instrument, I remember doing it for as long as I’ve been making music but it’s hard to pinpoint when I started taking it as a legitimate practice.
I began studying classical percussion at a young age, getting assigned Carter studies and Xenakis pieces, music far too complicated for me to understand structurally at the time. I’d find comfort in reducing that kind of repertoire to abstractions, in my head it was always the result of transcribed improvisation.
Soon enough, whenever I got tired of practicing rudiments or sight-reading, I’d improvise, mostly assembling different chops from technical exercises and whatever I was playing at the time.
It was only when I got to college that I joined punk and rock bands with people who shared an interest in noise and free music, and with whom I had my first experiences of collective improvisation.
Tell me about your instrument and/or tools, please. What made you seek it out, what makes it “your” instrument, and what are some of the most important aspects of playing it?
For the last couple of years, my main instrument has actually been my laptop.
While arranging what would become the first Amuleto Apotropaico record, which was essentially a heavily manipulated selection of live recordings, I resorted to software for fixing a lot of issues, whether by synthesizing new voices in order to add harmonic movement or by stretching the percussion to fill the void in certain areas of the spectrum.
That led me to delve deeper into tools like Max/MSP and it wasn't long before I started creating a system that allowed me to emulate my drumming language. In essence, it’s a sequencing algorithm mapped to MIDI controllers through which I can recall specific movements and a chain of resonators that allows me to shape the timbre of every hit, adding to it the endless cumulative nature of a digital environment.
Building these systems for this kind of music is really freeing. For me, it makes it hard for anything to sound boring. You get a different kind of intimacy with it, there’s fewer conventions you can fall into. So every new sound you find feels like “expanded technique”.
I should also mention that the laptop is just convenient. More than having the “ideal” tools, I value being able to sit down with the instrument for as long as I need. I can just plug it into my home setup and work, which is increasingly useful when living in a gentrifying city where finding a place to make noise is a growing concern.
How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument – is it an extension of your self/body, a partner and companion, a creative catalyst, a challenge to be overcome, something else entirely?
I think it can be a bit of all. The way my system is set up, you can put thoughts into practice in a very fast and intuitive way.
With practice, you think of a sound and your muscle memory does the rest, it can feel like a physical extension. Because of the generative aspect and heavy use of feedback in some patches, it can also feel like a different entity, something that can surprise you and demand an answer.
Building the instrument fits the “challenge to be overcome” description. It’s the more cerebral, problem-solving part of the process, whether through sound design work or just making everything interact the way you intend it to.
Derek Bailey defined improvising as the search for material which is endlessly transformable. What kind of materials have turned to be particularly transformable and stimulating for you?
I tend to collect sounds from different stages of a project, which I’ll later use as source material when creating something new.
For instance, this new record, Língua Espúria, is essentially a resampling chain, in the sense that every track is a rework of the previous one. It could just be an effective answer to the overwhelming nature of starting something new, but limiting myself to self-referencing has turned out to be a fruitful method.
Do you feel as though there are at least elements of composition and improvisation which are entirely unique to each? Based on your own work or maybe performances or recordings by other artists, do you feel that there are results which could only have happened through one of them?
That's a hard distinction to make, I think last century's composers might have made that exercise obsolete.
For pragmatic purposes, I regard the idea of improvisation as the refusal to have a detailed script: you reduce the decision-making time scale to immediacy.
But there's some degree of improvisation in every form of music. For me, it all depends on the role you want the creative process and live setting to play in the way your work is consumed. Disregard this and the argument becomes pointless.
When you're improvising, does it actually feel like you're inventing something on the spot – or are you inventively re-arranging patterns from preparations, practise or previous performances? What balance is there between forgetting and remembering in your work?
Inventively re-arranging patterns describes it well.
When practicing, I try to exhaust every event that might take place within the patch. While doing this, I naturally keep coming back to interactions, phrases and timbres that excite me, hopefully to the point where I’m able to promptly apply them.
This instinct-driven execution is what allows me to think of the performance on a broader scale, to concern myself with some kind of narrative, the actual structure of the whole.
Artists from all corner of the musical spectrum, not just “free jazz” have emphasised the importance of freedom in their creativity. What defines freedom for your improvisations?
It’s hard to define it, especially since I’m privileged enough to be part of a community that embraces all kinds of music, it’s not really a present concern. It’s difficult to even conceive of formal boundaries to break.
In fact, these days I actually feel like it’s easy for the so-called “underground” to turn into an algorithm-driven echo chamber where transgression for the sake of transgression gets far too much praise.
I was recently reading about the hostile reaction to Varèse’s Hyperprism premiere and thinking about how difficult it is to imagine what someone in my circumstances could do to trigger that kind of episode. Challenge in my music-making process is mostly self-imposed.
At the end of the day, creative work is just work. I wouldn’t say the oppression felt specifically targets creativity, it assumes a much broader form as an enslaving class conflict.
Taking your recent projects, releases, and performances as examples, what, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to improvisation?
While improvising, there’s always been a consciously mimetic thought behind my rhythmic approach. I draw a lot from speech patterns and cadence dynamics, somewhat directly referencing language as a means of communication.
Recently, I’ve been trying to balance this organic sense of pulse with synthetic timbres, stretching the borders of what you could consider an aesthetic identity until sound can just be assimilated as sound.
The transient-heavy nature of the latest systems opened up an impulse-response playground, so lately I’ve been particularly obsessed with the sense of spatial ambiguity you can get when distributing voices in disparate spaces.
In your best improvisations, do you feel a strong sense of personal presence or do you (or your ego) “disappear”?
I’ve seen incredible musicians picking up on the audience’s reaction and feeding it back into the music, but that just doesn’t work for me.
It depends on the context, but if I’m comfortable enough, I’ll disregard those dynamics. While performing, I don’t feel like I’m directly interacting with the audience, it’s like there’s a closed line of communication between me and whatever I’m creating, so, in some way, personal presence disappears. That’s my ideal scenario.
In more adverse conditions, the outside can take up a lot of my headspace, my perception of the performance timeline starts shrinking and things can quickly get out of control.
What are some of your favourite collaborators and how do they enrich your improvisations?
First one that comes to mind is Jejuno. We recently played a gig together in Porto, and it was a particularly rewarding experience.
She has an effortless way of navigating the performance, I could feed her any kind of material and she’d instantly find a way to resolve it and push further. I learned a lot from just standing by and watching her conjure her mind-bending, unquantized loops.
There can be surprising moments during improvisations – from one of the performers not playing a single note to another shaking up a quiet section with an outburst of noise. Can you tell me about such situations from your own performances and how they impacted the performance?
When improvising, there’s a set of problem-solving mechanisms that are put in motion. Interesting propositions usually lead to interesting resolutions, surprise pushes you out of comfort into new territory. I find risk to be essential to an engaging performance, it keeps your listening active and prevents your thoughts from drifting away.
The system used in the new record and the most recent performances relies heavily on generative tools and feedback. A considerable part of the machine’s response is left to chance.
So you could say it is designed to surprise.
