9. Women in Space
I attend a show on the weekend, featuring a few bands from the local scene. The performance is in hipster-heavy Palermo, in a venue called POMO. There’s three separate DJ acts, LNGCHPS, Bungalovv, and Serj from Astrosuka, credited as Astrosuka DJ set. Their sounds tend to be bassy, heavy, almost aggressive, and powerful. Two of these acts – Astrosuka and Bungalovv are affiliated with TRUUENO, a collective and label supporting various Buenos Aires electronic acts. Through many of these DJ sets, an abstract triple window projection lights up the back of the wall, though it is not always easy to see. They are joined by a fourth heavily aesthetic act, a large group called Bube Kaos Mayik Klan. The group perform in elaborate costumes, hoods, face masks, pieces of mirror and strange material helping to make up their cultist aesthetic. They present a winding, hypnotic droning sound, that seems to invite its listeners into a trance.
At some point the music stops suddenly, and from what I can tell police have come and shut things down, but this is only a temporary situation. Soon the music starts again. I stay out until the morning, and walk down the streets to arrive at a McDonalds where I wait for the start of public transport back to my hostel. At the end of the street, to the left, are expensive hotels. To the right, at the top of a concrete flight of steps, sleeps a boy.
A few days later I meet with Tatiana Heuman. Currently a member of Ricarda Cometa, previously a member of Astrosuka and The Buenos Aires Improvisational Orchestra, and still affiliated with label/collective TRRUENO, Tatiana is currently operating solo electronic music project Qeei.
Her music and own trajectory are characterised by a constant curiosity, and a continuing process of reinvention, exploration and experimentation, a process that is destined to continue onwards in the years that follow our meeting. Our conversation takes place in 2016, and by the time I am able to run it past her, some parts feel like ancient history.
Her improvisation focussed band Ricarda Cometa exemplifies this continuous exploration. Its sound has evolved alongside Tatiana’s own musical evolutions, changing as she’s moved from trumpet, to guitar, double bass, flute, and also drums, which led the band away from their focus on textures, towards a more rhythm focussed approach. Following a short hiatus, they’ve taken on a collaboration, releasing an album only a month ago, alongside Dario Dubois Duo.
“It's a fantastic drone duo with some krautrock influence,” she tells me. “This new release, everything is improvised. We went to the studio with Dario Dubois Duo. I was like, ‘Let's improvise,’ and we did many improvisations. Maybe we talked a little bit about, ‘Well, this improv will be a bit Ricarda Cometa style and this one will be more like drone and kraut like Dario Dubois stuff’. It was a very interesting job. It was really nice. Lulo and Jorge, the guitar players of Ricarda Cometa, my partners, they mixed it. Now it's done and it's on the internet. It's our most recent work. And now we are starting again. It's a band that has these strange tempos.”
She, along with the band, are keen to be playing live again after taking a frustrated break. It’s something that’s easier said than done, especially for an act who seek out a certain quality of sound.
“There's no money, sometimes there’s no nice, good sound, for example, you have no amplifiers in places, you don’t have the conditions that are the best for playing. I got exhausted and I said, ‘I don't want to play live anymore.’ Then eventually I said, ‘OK, I will play live again.’ It's something necessary I guess. I wanted to play somewhere else.”
Ricarda Cometa found the opportunity to play in new spaces through a fateful coincidence. When their guitarist Jorge travelled to New York to engage with the international improvisation scene, he formed a bond with Brian Chase, an improviser and member of indy rock band The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. This put them on stage in a local festival alongside the popular band. It was a positive experience with a sour aftertaste that came when the producers tried to insist that Ricarda Cometa pay them for their on-stage appearance.
Apart from Ricarda Cometa, Tatiana is now focussed on her own solo project Qeei. This was born, in part, from her experiences in Astrosuka.
“In that duo I realised that I like electronic music, I want to do electronic music, and I want to know how to do my own. I found a big possibility of expression, so then I left Astrosuka, and went, ‘I want to make my own.’ It was like a work of collage."
The process that generated this first solo work was profoundly valuable as a learning process - not so much in how to make electronic music, but how to do so in a way that would help her remain true to her own musical sensibilities. More than anything, she has learned to trust her own sense of creativity, and given herself permission to take the time to develop her sound intentionally rather than being caught in the overwhelming urge to create with immediacy.
"It’s taken a lot of time to find a new way of making my music. It’s going very, very slow because I don't want to do that collage again. I want to find my own sounds."
Her exploration goes beyond the auditory, expanding into explorations of space and performance.
"I'm working with a friend who is an architect. She works with led lights and objects. I also like dancing and performance so I'm trying to go that way, to see if I can come back to live interpretation because I find it very difficult to play electronic music live."
I ask if this is due to the challenge of presenting electronic music in an engaging way. To a point it is, but Tatiana emphasises that she doesn’t look down on artists who present from behind a laptop.
“I think it must be a decision to present in this way and not because it’s the only way I can think of. I mean, I find it interesting and I believe that the music is not only the music and not only the artist, the music is also the space, especially in a live set. It’s not only you, it’s also the whole space, it’s the people who are watching you, they are seeing you, and they and you are experimenting all that is happening. Everything's a decision and everything's important. That's why I'm now being more careful - I mean I'm careful, I was always careful, but with my personal platform, my personal work, I'm thinking more carefully - what do I want to do, and not to do something because I have that kind of anxiety that I have to do something now – that’s what I did the first time; I have to do something, I have to do something because if I don't do something I will die!”
This slower, more thoughtful process characterises her current collaboration with a local artist. They had previously collaborated in 2013 with the development of a light set that was used with Astrosuka. They are developing a piece that's like a cross between a performance and an installation, using glass containers filled with water.
"I'm moving these containers with water. She is moving the light, and it's like playing a game, like an inspiration. Something very nice happened. We have already done it one week ago. We needed to take this out to test it, see what happened. Now we are interested in maybe being more site specific with the same material… because the containers are made of glass and if you forget about this, the floor will sound and also the container, so that changed our performance a lot. Because the sounds are very different, it depends on the floor, it depends on the walls.”
I ask if it’s common in Buenos Aires to use visual elements. I think back to the weekend performance, with the projected visuals from the DJs, and the elaborate costumes and dancing of Bube Kaos Mayik Klan.
“Sometimes you have great visuals making great things, and sometimes people are not really paying attention to the visuals. And also, in the places where we play, sometimes we don’t have the great screen or a nice projector or like a nice place where you can order the lights turned down. You cannot see that something is happening with the projector if the lights are not turned down like the concert the other night… Bungalovv makes a visual performance that we couldn’t really appreciate that because it was like the lights were turned on.”
While other artists continue to explore new avenues of performance and theatricality (Bube Kaos are notable here), Tatiana notes that she is one of few people exploring in the space of installation. Her own particular combination of interests means she is hard to nail down to any single community.
“I was always in different scenes of music, interacting at the same time with different circles of artists and styles. And now I'm in this electronic collective called TRRUENO and at the same time I have friends who are more improvisers... Also in my crew we have different kinds of artists and we have different researchers. Now I am more interested in installations but I have other members of the crew who are more interested in danceable music or VJing or just producing others… I’m always in diverse contexts.”
Certainly, one force pushing these contexts together is an element of outside pressure. But Tatiana also sees positive forces driving this movement together.
"Things are getting close because we are in this era of, 'We don’t mind what is and what is not, we just don’t care.' So we also are not interested in defining what music is. I make music, no, I make what I am. And I think that’s something a lot of people are discovering in their own research. Who am I as an artist? What can I do with the resources I have?”
Aesthetically, her project Qeei strikes me as quite feminine, both in its sound and visuals. This sensibility has emerged organically from Tatiana’s creative process. Her femininity is of course a part of her identity, as too is a certain pop sensibility that emerges from her earliest days falling in love with music.
She notes that the musical world seems strongly male dominated. At university, her subjects exploring music were often male heavy.
“I was always interested in researching how sound works and always, men, men, men everywhere!"
Some months later, Tatiana messages me. As always, she is in flux, evolving personally and creatively. Gender has since cemented itself as a more dominant pillar of her work. The personal became political, she writes. She is involved now with a project called VIVAS. We define this project as the need of a group of people who identify with the feminine gender and its social consequences and will fight for their emancipation through sound and music.
The project expands in a range of social and creative directions. Like Tatiana herself, it is evolving, responsive to a world that refuses to stand still.
But we will return to the future soon enough - for now we will return to 2016, to an interview outside of a University, in a country whose resilient musical scene always has another surprise hidden around the corner.
At the end of our interview I asked Tatiana, as I’ve asked others, for what advice she’d offer those considering travelling to Buenos Aires.
“Well, we are very open,” she says. “That’s something very nice we have here. We are accepting of foreign people. We are interested in having this kind of communication, and I think everybody is like this, so some people coming from outside is good. Now that we are in the network and the Internet era, we can make some kind of communication. It’s good to come here and see what happens. It’s nice to communicate with us; we are the artists already here and we know what it’s like, what’s happening. When we go somewhere else, I try to find an artist who can guide me where I wouldn’t fully go as a tourist. I think that’s important, being in touch with us, with artists from other places.”
... |
DON'T WAITYou can read all 11 chapters online and offline by buying the physical copy of Si Nos Organizamos from Blurb.
Or, get the ebook and chapter access via the CLUTTERED BUTTS Patreon - $5 will grant access to this work, as well as CHASING ERIS, UNITED WE FNORD, SPAM BOT LOVE SONG and more. |