10. Conspiracy of silence
Maxi has organised for me to meet with Leticia Soma, a large, heavy sounding band who have been a major part of Fauna records. We meet in the dark space of an underground venue. The members have a heavy rock aesthetic, with deep black facial hair. The band have been making music since 2006, with the current line-up established in 2009. I speak mainly with front-man Facundo.
“You would have started not long after Cromañón,” I observe.
“Yes,” he says. “We already were playing music with another band. Maybe the two of them were more professional. And we think that after that, the musicians became dangerous for society. Now today you can see in the news, the band that was playing that night in Cromañón today is going to jail. It's in every newspaper, the television. It's recent news.”
Without reliable Internet, a good grasp of Spanish, or access to TV, I’ve been following the news around Callejeros completely through the graffiti around the city, which mostly proclaimed their innocence. But this is new to me. I have to look it up later, to find that the results of their 2014 appeal have recently come through, with the lead singer jailed for 7 years, the rest of the band for 5.
Leticia Soma, only a year old at the time of the fire, were forced to adapt to these new anti-musician attitudes.
“After that we had to resign that scene, looking out for new places, new ways of playing music.”
This shift changed the nature of musical infrastructure and who could take advantage of it.
“The change that I think is more visible in the media is the fusion you get on the radio. The radio plays pop music that is commercial; maybe rock became forbidden.”
As is the case in much of the country, Facundo seems conflicted about the result.
“I think that they are guilty, but at the same time they are a victim of the system. They were too greedy and I think they have to pay the consequence, but I think this morning report of guilty – it’s hard to say if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, them being in jail.”
I ask Leticia Soma a little about their music. Maxi told me it was political, I say.
“In a way. It's about conspiracy and secret government, spiritual things, again, the media, the matrix; in a way it’s a political album… It has to do with the world and the real power, the real economic, financial, political power. We think the government we see on the TV are puppets and there's someone in the shadows shaping them.”
Leticia Soma are certainly a band with a global perspective. They’ve played widely, throughout Argentina, and out to Mexico. They embrace the breadth and inclusivity of the local scene.
“[There’s] a lot of bands which are very different to each other, and maybe they share the same space. There’s no confrontation between one style and another. I think we have made a place for everyone.”
Leticia Soma are heavily active in supporting the scene. Like others I’ve met, they wear many hats. All members have non-musical second jobs (walking dogs, working in law, office work) but also run their own musical empire from the shadows, managing the heavy music wing of Fauna records. They show me some of the albums under the Fauna label, some which I’ve already seen from Matias. Cardiel from Venezuela, Terror Cósmico from Mexico, Montana Electrica and, of course, Leticia Soma.
“We are the same as Fauna but supporting the stoner style and hardcore. The ideology is the same,” Facundo says. This includes distribution and assisting international bands in find their feet in Argentina.
I ask if there’s financial profit in what they do.
“It's from the love of music,” he says. “Share the experience, some music, nothing else. A lot of work.”
I am ready for the final interview of my trip, with Javier Areal Velez of Calato, and El Helicóptero, as well as the disbanded act Coso. He has a thick head of hair, and intelligent features. Right now, he is celebrating the release of a finally complete album from Calato. He hands me a copy of the album, simply presented in wrapped brown cardboard covered in simple black and brown printed imagery of natural formations, hunters, birds. The work is of improvised music recorded three years ago, which has finally been produced into physical form. Javier describes the tracks as ‘improvised songs’, a very intentional choice, for an improvisation act.
“There's two different traditions - to talk about the song or to talk about the piece, the composition,” Javier tells me. “Right now I like the idea of the song better. For instance, I think the first call I made with that was that at a point you say, ‘Chorus’ and then ‘Chorus’ again, ‘Chorus!’ The chorus is probably fucked up with noise and stuff but I like to think that that kind of idea bleeds through somehow. It's a way of organising the material of the music. So we finished, we recorded about three years ago, about fifteen scores, many takes. Each take is different; sometimes we even read the scores upside down or from right to left. So by the end of it we had like 51 takes, most of them very short. It was a bit overwhelming.”
Calato first breathed life in 2010. Like other artists we've met, Javier was inspired by a couple of improvisation workshops that took place in Buenos Aires in this year. The workshops let to a boom in improvisation in the city. One workshop, held by trumpet player Leonel Kaplan, introduced Javier to Jorje Espinal and Tatiana Heuman from Ricarda Cometa. Then there was another workshop, dedicated to building the improvised musical orchestra.
Javier’s involvement in the improvised orchestra was short lived – he felt the project was too open-ended to achieve anything – but through Calato, his involvement with the improvisational art form was not.
“We found even if it was free impro we had to develop this language; we tried to do very free high intensity changes and things, so we had to learn how to look at each other, how to listen and really connect. So we worked on that a lot at first, then we played lot. But then maybe sometimes we'd have six months without a gig and nothing would happen. For instance, last year I think we played only twice. And now, with this record we finished in February, we are really in a good moment. We play tomorrow, we play two weeks from that, two weeks from that and this record - we did the physical edition ourselves but it’s been put up in a net label and they're really working to get us a couple of gigs”
The netlabel, PSH, is based locally.
“I was trying to find a label from abroad for some of my things. And I found it a bit hard because many don't even answer if it's someone they don't know. Many reply, ‘Yeah it sounds great but right now we don't have any money,’ and many are focussed on bands that are touring or playing there. So then we get to the extreme of what we are doing now, that these guys told us, ‘OK we don't have any money, we are just two guys, but we can help, let us know what we can do to help or whatever.’ And that honesty and upfrontness is really great. For me that’s the one thing that we expect from a label, these guys are helping us move around, getting gigs.”
This comment makes me wonder a little about something that’s been bugging me – that I know little about how these structures, these labels and so on replicate internationally or whether the Argentine Label system is a unique entity. I later write to academic Christian Greer, who is well versed in the machinations of underground communities, sharing with him what I’ve seen of the label system here. Does this seem unique, or is it a well-established model, I ask.
He responds by email, telling me that similar trends are visible internationally, especially amongst Anarchist groups.
Anarchist collectives across the world are happy to assist anarchist bands with coordination, recording, promoting, distribution, etc. since they are fighting for the same world historical outcome. Unlike most labels, they are driven by a shared (utopian) ideology, and not profits. That said, anarchists are not the only ones who work in this way. Solidarity (and not profits, fame, fortune, etc.) is also the animating principle for music labels that are fascist, feminist, ultra-green, taquacore (islamic punk), etc. In sum, the label you encountered is unexceptional, at least for radical subcultures on the margins of culture.
“I meant that’s the story in the underground everywhere right?” Javier tells me “It’s the same thing that’s in the DIY culture that appears in bands like Fugazi. It’s the same thing of survival. For example, with Jorge, the guitarist in Ricarda Cometa and Calato, I organised a series of concerts. It’s a series that doesn't have a fixed place or frequency, but happens when it happens. That’s been going great. We usually do it when people come from abroad because they write to us, so we try to put something together. This also came into being naturally because people were asking us to make gigs and we shared this kind of thing, helping work out how to curate gigs which I felt many times is missing… Usually we try to program things in a complementary way, mixing different styles of strange music. So you are not going to see, for instance, three sets of pure improv; for me that is exhausting, you know, as an audience member.”
“We found even if it was free impro we had to develop this language; we tried to do very free high intensity changes and things, so we had to learn how to look at each other, how to listen and really connect. So we worked on that a lot at first, then we played lot. But then maybe sometimes we'd have six months without a gig and nothing would happen. For instance, last year I think we played only twice. And now, with this record we finished in February, we are really in a good moment. We play tomorrow, we play two weeks from that, two weeks from that and this record - we did the physical edition ourselves but it’s been put up in a net label and they're really working to get us a couple of gigs”
The netlabel, PSH, is based locally.
“I was trying to find a label from abroad for some of my things. And I found it a bit hard because many don't even answer if it's someone they don't know. Many reply, ‘Yeah it sounds great but right now we don't have any money,’ and many are focussed on bands that are touring or playing there. So then we get to the extreme of what we are doing now, that these guys told us, ‘OK we don't have any money, we are just two guys, but we can help, let us know what we can do to help or whatever.’ And that honesty and upfrontness is really great. For me that’s the one thing that we expect from a label, these guys are helping us move around, getting gigs.”
This comment makes me wonder a little about something that’s been bugging me – that I know little about how these structures, these labels and so on replicate internationally or whether the Argentine Label system is a unique entity. I later write to academic Christian Greer, who is well versed in the machinations of underground communities, sharing with him what I’ve seen of the label system here. Does this seem unique, or is it a well-established model, I ask.
He responds by email, telling me that similar trends are visible internationally, especially amongst Anarchist groups.
Anarchist collectives across the world are happy to assist anarchist bands with coordination, recording, promoting, distribution, etc. since they are fighting for the same world historical outcome. Unlike most labels, they are driven by a shared (utopian) ideology, and not profits. That said, anarchists are not the only ones who work in this way. Solidarity (and not profits, fame, fortune, etc.) is also the animating principle for music labels that are fascist, feminist, ultra-green, taquacore (islamic punk), etc. In sum, the label you encountered is unexceptional, at least for radical subcultures on the margins of culture.
“I meant that’s the story in the underground everywhere right?” Javier tells me “It’s the same thing that’s in the DIY culture that appears in bands like Fugazi. It’s the same thing of survival. For example, with Jorge, the guitarist in Ricarda Cometa and Calato, I organised a series of concerts. It’s a series that doesn't have a fixed place or frequency, but happens when it happens. That’s been going great. We usually do it when people come from abroad because they write to us, so we try to put something together. This also came into being naturally because people were asking us to make gigs and we shared this kind of thing, helping work out how to curate gigs which I felt many times is missing… Usually we try to program things in a complementary way, mixing different styles of strange music. So you are not going to see, for instance, three sets of pure improv; for me that is exhausting, you know, as an audience member.”
Despite a penchant for curating, the process of whittling down the songs to a small collection took a long time. The album drifted along, before the band accelerated the process in order to complete the album before two members travelled internationally for their own projects. One of these was Jorge, Calato’s guitarist and also a member of Ricarda Cometa, whose trip to New York involved performing with improvisor Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
“The thing with him being the drummer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it’s this other side - he's just one improvisor in New York. There are many of them… That's the thing about NY, there's not so much a thing about stardom. Once you're there performing improv in a shitty place nobody gives a fuck, nobody’s like, ‘Oh it's this guy.’ He’s just another guy there who plays for five people like they all do, and he gets paid 7 dollars on a good night. It's an amazing scene down there, but it's also fuckin’ rough. For, you know, living.”
Javier has also travelled quite a bit with his music. He travelled to Mexico with the band Coso, playing some of the biggest gigs of his career thus far, and was able to open for bands such as Black Pus and Japanese act Melt-Banana.
“The thing with him being the drummer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, it’s this other side - he's just one improvisor in New York. There are many of them… That's the thing about NY, there's not so much a thing about stardom. Once you're there performing improv in a shitty place nobody gives a fuck, nobody’s like, ‘Oh it's this guy.’ He’s just another guy there who plays for five people like they all do, and he gets paid 7 dollars on a good night. It's an amazing scene down there, but it's also fuckin’ rough. For, you know, living.”
Javier has also travelled quite a bit with his music. He travelled to Mexico with the band Coso, playing some of the biggest gigs of his career thus far, and was able to open for bands such as Black Pus and Japanese act Melt-Banana.
“Mexico is amazing, it's bigger than you think, bigger than New York. It's full of people and there’s many, many good musicians so it’s a great discovery. We also did some other gigs and I did some impro gigs with guys from there, they were so into it and so warm. It was great. And then I want to New York, you know, the temperature was cooler and they don't care much about, “Hey I'm here on tour!” There’s like 20 guys here on tour, they don't care, it’s the same excuse its fine. So, it’s great, the best thing, I love going there to play. There’s so many people and most of them are open to play. It’s great, it’s very nurturing for a musician but I think it’s also very rough. I think you never get any money.”
Javier has toured yearly, alternating between Europe and New York for the past four years. However, touring spends money more than it makes. While others I've spoken to see touring as they key to financial success as a musician in Buenos Aires, Javier differs. Either way, it's practically impossible. However, touring in Latin America has additional geographical challenges.
“There's many things going on in a big city like Buenos Aires, but the distances between cities are huge and the air transport expensive so there’s not really a concept of touring in the traditional sense of doing different cities every night. You basically travel to other Latin American cities for one offs, which of course is a big move and usually it’s hard for one gig to cover the costs. You can go to La Plata, but that’s close to here, and that’s it. So that’s the thing that's kind of missing: the geographical connection and easiness of transport between cities in Europe or even the States. Of course, in NY there's nothing you can do to get money but you can tour a lot, go out to a million cities, then you can go to college campuses and you get money or whatever and in Europe it’s similar. Of course, it takes much money to tour those places. You start out, at a thousand Euros to buy a ticket. I don’t think you can make a living off just being a musician down here, at least the kind of music I do.”
I ask, if without really being able to fully live off touring, if this is all just for the love of music and travel, and he agrees.
“I’m trying to make it work more and more. I mean last time was better; I got four or five gigs that paid nicely, got to book more cities, so it was looking good, got halfway through the trip. I was OK with that; it was a great improvement. The time before, it was like nothing. Then the Mexico thing; we got a bit of money from the festival then got a couple of tickets with state support. That was not too bad.”
We talk about some of Javier’s previous bands, starting with innovative act Coso.
“When I finished high school, I went to college to study contemporary composition, and like half the people going there, I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into… When I was there I was a bit lost. I was studying making scores and electroacoustic composition; I was always fighting with the university a little bit. I never got anywhere there, but for me it was a bit conflictive. Only when I was finished there, something clicked. In my last year there I was sure I was not going to do any more music, for real, because I couldn't finish a project.
‘The next year, 2009, at the beginning of the year, I went to New York for the first time, in February and saw so much music. It was great. I came back and I started Coso straight away. For me, composing and making music with Coso was really quick and to the point. In the past it was taking so long to finish things, then I got here and it was like, ‘OK, I have an idea,’ and got the guitar and the computer and recorded some sounds then got the bass, some beats, OK it’s a song! It's like really, really fast. It's this idea of just working and then if that song didn't work, OK I'll do another one. But I was not reworking the song until I found the right thing. I was more like taking the impulse, like some little idea just exploded there.”
Coso’s short, quickly developed songs were also presented in innovative ways. Often the band would perform in unusual settings using found objects from that space.
“We never went to the extreme of only using that. We brought those things into the music. The nice thing for me with Coso was that we had these very strict compositions that were written down or whatever. We didn't have much impro, mostly we'd know what to play, and we'd rehearse a lot to make it tight. Then when we got to the gig, we found a way to make the same songs work, but with things from there. So there was an element of surprise in what would happen, I think for us, and hopefully at some point for the audience as well. It was really interesting to do that. We had this idea about every gig being different also. At some points we had a more straightforward gig with little tweaks. We also had some more extreme things. For one concert we decided to make all songs have singers, and invited fifteen people to sing one song each, because the songs were really short. Most of them were one-minute songs, maybe one song was two minutes. Sometimes we played in a place that was a bit more industrial and we brought the whole gig with us. One thing we did with our drummer was that she would play shit that’s lying around and add contact mikes or whatever. We played this place that had a really big hundred-year old boiler, and we put in contact mics. Or sometimes we composed something for a place. It was pretty fun to do.”
Coso finished up operations a year and a half ago, something Javier attributes somewhat playfully to ‘the human condition.’ Following the end of Coso, Javier wanted to continue exploring planned song-writing.
“I wanted to do things with proper chords and melodies at some point and see if it still had the weird feeling that came with something that's instrumental, but this time really keeping those melodic elements, so I started those things, and I wanted a singer because I don't sing.”
This singer was Ignacio Sandoval, someone whom Javier has continued a working relationship with. Ignacio has performed in a wide range of bands, including El Espíritu Santo. Also in this project was Luciano Vitale, who played in Ricarda Cometa. This project was named ‘El Helicóptero.’
“I grew up with the Beatles in my top ten - I mean they still are – but there’s this idea that pop is completely massive and mainstream and whatever, but also it's fucked up at some level and it's pushing boundaries, but in a smart way. It’s not just random, completely fucked up one-hour random noise. OK, let’s take all these ideas, make them fit in a two-minute song. For me, it’s like a huge challenge. And also the idea of working in the studio, using it as an instrument. So that’s the background for this project. The idea with El Helicóptero, is to make the album in the studio, so we started doing it, recording, harmonising in some places, not thinking about how to perform it or about specific formations.”
We are running out of time – Javier has to leave for another obligation, and I am approaching the end of my time in Argentina. But before we part, Javier drops a revelation on me – that I have in fact been staying a short walk from one of the best-known unofficial venues in Buenos Aires this whole time, a place called Una Casa. Like other such places, this is a private residence converted to a performance space where shows are performed outside of the law.
“At one point the guy had to close the place because it's his house. But he was able to really sustain it as a venue because he has a different way of working; police would come to the door and he'd say, ‘You cannot come in here. There’s nothing going on, bye.’ The police were like, ‘What's going on?’ They are so used to pushing people around and didn’t expect someone to just refuse to let them in. He’s very careful.
‘At one point a musician did an interview in a newspaper with and they promoted a gig there and put in his address so the owner said, ‘OK, I'm closing the place. It’s over.’ Like that, no doubt. He closed it for a year or more, then he slowly started opening again. It was weird because we had been almost complaining, 'Ahh, we always play in the same place,' and when it closed it was like, ‘Fuck, we really depended on that place, this sucks!’ Because it meant that the scene was not so diverse.”
Javier contacts the person behind Una Casa, and he allows us to visit. We take a short walk down the street. The house is unassuming, like any other, but inside and down a flight of stairs we can see the makeshift performing space. There are artistic black and white photos over the walls, as part of an art show hosted here.
Soon it is time to go. I say my goodbyes and pack up my things from the hostel. Most of my bag is taken up with CDs I have been gifted over the course of the trip. It has been a short, fast and warm experience, being allowed into this community, characterised by the love of music and the solidarity of survival.
... |
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