INTERVIEW WITH PAULO RAPOSO (complete version)

 

 

Use of Sound and Image

 

My point of view is that of seeing image and sound as two parallel realities, which may be contaminated, may develop in a disjunctive way and not merely as illustration.  One supporting the other.

In the case of cinema, the sound is in general always there to the detriment of the image, while in other performance contexts the opposite happens - for example, in the banal case of dance music, the so-called V.J. [Video Jockey].  What really interests me is developing things that never meet.  They don’t meet, unless by virtue of what they carry within them in terms of meaning which can be transmuted.

They don’t meet, but they move in parallel.  It’s as in mathematics, the asymptotic curve, which is two curves that get near and nearer each other but never actually meet.  I’m much more interested in the space which is between the image and the sound than the actual direct relationship and synchronicity of image and sound.  That is to say, I’m not interested in causal relationships, determinist in character, but I try to seek out things that happen and come together within a work.  What interests me is more the interval of décalage between these two aspects.

I like to use banal images, footage of no great complexity, almost raw.  This can be anything from home movies to images of trees, objects, or small events that, shall we say, have absolutely no symbolic resonance or value.  And then I like to move them, to take hold of this near-insignificance of the image and transform them in order to achieve something else.

With both sound and image, I tend to give pride of place to the organic aspect, I try to play with the intensities of small modules that intersect, without exactly referring to each other, though they obviously use fragments, which are usually called samples, without any great significance in themselves, because they don’t work as quotation.  Thus, I seek in both sound and image to take hold of all these fragments in order to establish them within a flux in which the whole is greater than the parts.

Since I don’t use sounds and images as quotation, I don’t feel the danger of illustration.  When I’m working on a piece, I don’t intend to illustrate anything.  Even when there’s an explicit theme, as in the piece On Paper, which was a commission from Pedro Tudela based on the sounds of paper, what interests me there is not illustrating in a literary fashion, but finding another kind of elective affinity of secret correspondences and evocations that the material itself brings with it.  The “material” side of the material perhaps suggests more to me than its context, or its value as such.

 

 

Sound Particles

 

I don’t like things to be smooth.  I’m always particularly attentive to the texture and to the relationship of various textural elements that go through the piece.  I like to establish a certain multidimensionality in which the texture is nor seen as a particle, as a unit, but perhaps rather through multidimensionality of sounds which are in a more or less unstable equilibrium.

 

 

Acousmatic Music: Refusal of visual means by the super-concentration of sound.

 

I don’t agree that in acousmatic music there is exactly a total refusal of the visual element; I think exactly the opposite.  For example, in Parmegiani’s De Natura Sonorum, which I consider to be the best acousmatic work, a model from nature is presented.  But perhaps my interest is more theoretically linked to Francisco Lopez, than the acousmatic music of today as such.

I think that what is called acousmatic music, especially that of French origin, and also from Quebec, because of the French-speaking influence, has crystallized into some kind of cubism of excessive transformation of sound, excessive disruptions and in a discourse that very often, with the exception of some more intense and personal works, is merely academic, especially in the obvious and manipulative character of sound fragments.  It’s in this sense that I criticize it, because though there’s that break with image, it seems still to have a very central role as metaphor.  There are quite a lot of titles that make reference to landscapes, to water and other natural elements.  The father of that was Pierre Schaeffer: his first pieces have titles such as Studies for Railway Tracks, Noise Study; in other words, they are titles that have a very visual charge still, connected to a kind of surrealism, a dream-like transformation of the objects.

This is why I feel more interested theoretically in the sound work of Francisco Lopez, since what interests him is to go beyond the order of syntagmas and linguistics, with an approach that’s no longer analytical – which is another criticism that might be made of acousmatic music, too analytical and Cartesian – while other things, into which one may go more deeply, allow a phenomenological immediacy, or the idea of a flux that is played with in terms of perception and cognition.

 

 

Electroacoustics: Recorded and Real Time

 

I work with both recorded and real time electronics; when I play live, I prefer to do it in real time rather than with a disc, for example, because the object itself has a structure that I think is not worth working with in real time, because otherwise it would become a document.  But when I work in real time on disc, I try out various things, the end result being a selection.  This implies cuts, there’s an indeterminate time for working.  But this is as Steve Lacy would say, if you ask what is improvised or composed music in real time, you only have five or ten seconds to reply, but if the question is put via e-mail, then you can do it again several times.

 

In other words, obviously we have structures to begin with, or several structures: the structure of the software itself that one is using; in my case I produce more or less my own software, depending on the choices one makes in terms of treatment, in terms of generation, manipulation, equalization, filtering...  The approach of the actual sounds already implies a choice.  So things are not as aleatoric as that, and then of course there are sound banks, in you are not working with someone who is generating the actual sound.  Real time is more the last part of the process, in which we can surprise; it depends.  It depends on the situation.  I try to work in accordance with each specific situation, for example, in the Vitriol project, practically everything there is improvised.

I don’t mean by this that there is no electroacoustic music in real time.  In fact, elecroacoustic is just the technical designation of this kind of music, and doesn’t tell you anything about electroacoustic music.  Real time is simply the way the music itself is presented.  It may be composed, fixed, it may have variables that cross and are then worked in real time.  I must say that I am somewhat allergic to standard definitions.  I don’t think that they help us to orientate ourselves at all; in particular they don’t help people who are beginning to work, because they end up creating lanes in which one is restricted to one type of languages which is then reproduced by various kinds of models which begin in the schools and finish in the festivals, in the performance and circulation of the works themselves.

 

 

Computer Music

 

I don’t write music for computer, computer music.  We come back to the question of whether computer music is only a part of the process.  So the process transcends the instrument.  I have no interest in doing things that are too typified; in other words, the computer ends up being an interlocutor which allows me to develop certain kinds of processes – processes and final output.  But previously, there has been a great deal of work which is almost, shall we say, analogue.  It’s work with, for example, a microphone and other elements that don’t have to do with the computer.  The computer is only the final output, it’s what people see when it’s performed... improvised.  The computer functions merely as an instrument of improvisation.  So when my name appears on the list: “Paulo Raposo – Laptop”, it’s necessarily incomplete, it’s just my stage instrument.

 

 

Sounds

 

I begin by collecting sounds from various sources.  Normally they are picked up by a microphone.  First there’s the sound recording in different spaces with different acoustic properties, whether architectonic or natural  - closed or open spaces.  Others may be synthesized sounds, made straight on the computer, and others can be stranger still, as, for example, on this last disc which will come out, with two pieces in which the basis is an amplifier that is not working properly, and that, as one alters the volume, produces alterations of frequency.  What I did was to record on a DAT a series of takes with the amplifier’s dysfunction.  I think it’s interesting to be open to the sounds that occur or appear to me, without any pre-defined logic, on any kind of level, in other words.  The accidental dimension as a factor that interests me for the sound discourse is symptomatic, as for example in this case of the amplifier.  I limit myself merely to making use of these accidents when they happen, and when I think that they make sense within the whole.

 

 

The conceptual aspect of music

 

Actually, I am concerned with articulating different things and the sound material on the basis of ideas or concepts.  It’s a habit that I have had since I was small, of organizing lists and materials and making plans for them, which sometimes don’t come about.  I like to organize myself mentally, without exactly creating a paradigm, but rather a kind of shadow which will orientate the subsequent work, the concrete work of composition, of sound recording and of thinking how the different parts may be articulated.

There may be an influence from my study of philosophy, because I try to give a meaning and a particular attention to the concepts, in that they allow us to think.  They allow an opening, in which one may navigate, make connections, create fixed points and at the same time mobile points.  Perhaps it’s this interplay between these headlights and what’s around them, what bubbles and what murmurs, what breathes and what’s between things, that I consider very interesting.

 

 

Deleuze’s Rhizome

 

A concept is essentially an image.  I think that the image of the rhizome is very rich in possibilities for artistic creation, whatever the genre or idiom, whether music, plastic or performance.  So this still influences me, because this image is always behind, it works as a line, a path that continues to illuminate what one does, and works almost like critical reason.

 

 

The Graphic aspect of discs

 

I usually pay attention to the graphic aspect, for example the disc covers, and I tend to favour a certain minimalism, which is not forced.  It’s not conceived so as to project a kind of austere image, I merely want to places things in a certain dimension which is not the dimension of exacerbating certain aspects.  I provide only the essential information, without attributing to it an excessive importance.  This comes perhaps from a reaction against noise, against excess of information.  It’s against information saturation, so it’s not exactly an aesthetic element, but purification.  I look for simple things, with images that also favour the textural side, but without being too romantic.

 

 

The concept of purification in music and sound

 

I never liked Wagner much, for example.  I don’t like very romantic things, or collages.  I don’t like things that can cause a profusion of elements.  In terms of contemporary music, this means that my approach is also not the same.  Perhaps I prefer Morton Feldman to noisier, more verbose things.  Perhaps I place more value on minimal information, unless the data justify more.  Even in everyday life, there is a great deal of information, much of it completely useless and which serves only for self-repetition and to distract one’s attention.

At this time, when there are more and more discs and books, more consumer objects in other words, I think it’s important to maintain a kind of boundary, and to illuminate only what is essential.

 

 

Improvisation

 

As I said just now, I have a certain allergy to facile designations.  Now, if improvisation has always been part of music, when we call it “improvisation”, it’s all somewhat vague.  If this is an essential aspect of western classical music, from the time of Bach or Liszt, or any other music, when things are crystallized, one creates a stamp that doesn’t interest me personally.  Improvisation is one of the essential components of the act of creation, but to conclude from that, that what I do is improvised music is to forget other aspects.

 

 

Composer?

 

I don’t feel that I’m a composer in the academic sense, but a composer in the way in which, for example, Franco Donatoni presents himself, as a weaver or artisan, who weaves together various things, yes.  In this respect, the boundaries are already too tenuous between the work of composition, but that’s not what I mean.  It’s difficult nowadays to establish these boundaries so rigidly, because they are already so tenuous.