Cassandra Voices

Tag: cassandra voices musician of the month

  • Musician of the Month: Matilde Politi

    Do you know the feeling of wanting to discover secrets that aren’t being spoken aloud?

    For a while I thought it was an esoteric way of preserving knowledge. I imagined there were savants to seek out, to turn to.

    And in search of traces, I became passionate about chasing and searching for the threads of various human cultures, intertwined for thousands of years, starting from the perspective of Sicily, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.

    At a certain point I began to realize that the secrets were no longer alive: the people were gone, without leaving a cultural legacy behind.

    Impossible, you will say. Everyone leaves an enduring oral imprint on the people around them. And yet, through passages less emphatic than the burning of books, or the eradication of cultural witnesses, a culture may be overwhelmed and deleted by a dominant culture, leading to the progressive decay and then complete disappearance of a cultural legacy over a few generations.

    Cultural Imperialism

    We are the result of five thousand years of cultural imperialism, which has slowly led to the affirmation of the strongest and most violent group, which now presents itself as an international, global monoculture that has drastically overwhelmed all others. It is the culture of today’s contemporary globalized world: capitalist, patriarchal, monotheistic and consumerist, in which a few cultural differences found at various latitudes appear almost as commercial nuances – variations on stimulating consumption.

    As soon as I realized that I was living in an era directed by a total cultural monopoly, I began frenziedly passing on, divulging, recomposing and reviving those shreds of a subaltern culture that I could find; whether they were dying, or perhaps already immortalized by a lone enthusiast, annotated and then recorded over the past centuries; although often in forms not suitable for preserving the enduring ferments in the material of oral tradition.

    I sought the secrets “between the lines” of verses or stories: after all, we know that this way has always been used to preserve and pass on things: concealing them in a joke, a rhyme, a riddle, a bell, or a proto-memory.

    I searched inside song traditions, oral stories, and in the repertoire of oral tradition, which they have not been able to completely eradicate from memory: precisely the songs of oral tradition which has the potential to preserve and pass on secrets about the meaning of life, the most important baggage that generations have the burden to pass on – at all costs and through all possible stratagems – in case of censorship and oppression.

    Women’s Songs in the Sicilian Tradition

    In the last few years I have been primarily interested in Women’s Song in the Sicilian tradition, which constitutes an even more fragile niche in the midst of the general fragility of the heritage of tradition, since it suffers in addition from the perpetual minority suffered by the patriarchal cultures that have followed one another since the third millennium B.C..

    It is a repertoire scarcely paid attention to, liminal to other stronger and more manifest repertoires, more excavated and documented; and in any case predominantly investigated from a male perspective; from a point of view that is still and always hegemonic, in terms of the gender question.

    This is the most fertile repertoire for those who, like me, are in search of handed-down secrets: women represent a particular segment of social reality, in which the needs of the private and family sphere interpenetrate uniquely with the needs of the public, socio-economic sphere; women have the task of ensuring the survival and growth of the social actors of the future, the children, and women, have the task of turning the economic wheel of the family micro-society. Always.

    Lullabies

    The musical repertoire of women is often a mixture of different genres that refer both to the classic cycle of life – including lullabies, engagement, wedding songs and funeral laments – and to the sphere of work, as well as to the religious sphere, in a diversified way according to the religion of reference.

    Often the added value that we find in the fragments of female repertoire is that there is a greater purity and resistance to the assimilation of the hegemonic cultures, alongside a tendency towards fusion.

    Having been maintained and handed down in an intimate and private setting, and almost always in the absence of musical instruments, they have not been subject to admixture and transformation to adapt to changing tastes and fashions, resulting in the loss of content and precision of message.

    In the repertoire of female gender, the first place – cultural universal – is entrusted to the chapter of maternity. That is to the lullabies and dirges that women in every part of the world sing to their children to quieten them and accompany them in their sleep.

    The lullaby is the song of intimacy and privacy, it remains contextualized to the intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship.

    I am convinced that the valorization – the patrimonialisation of this enormous cultural baggage, immaterial heritage of the human race – restores strength, health and richness to the woman, and to her social role. It is a wide and shared documentation of this infinite repertoire, allowing for the patrimonialisation of a real hidden and almost unused treasure.

    My two latest albums from 2019: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo and of 2020: Viva Santa Liberata. Sicilian Women Folksongs, are dedicated to the traditional female repertoire. They are the culmination of many years of research – an audio production project investigating, witnessing, and passing on this repertoire.

    The path of research on lullabies has been going on for twenty years. It includes field research, the testimonies of women in the first person through intercultural workshops, archival research, and even authorship in some cases.

    Above all it has come about in meetings, not only with women but also often with sensitive men who have a strong sense of the magical power of the lullaby.

    Collaborators

    The opportunity to record an album of lullabies presented itself in 2018. Thankfully, the idea received a warm welcome from the singer friends to whom I proposed a collaboration, under my artistic direction (Simona Di Gregorio, Costanza Paternò, Clara Salvo, the very young Rawen Laid).

    Each had the task of testifying some traditional lullabies, not only Sicilian but looking to a wider Mediterranean culture for inspiration, with freedom of choice in the type of processing and repurposing; the disc: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo (2019) represents one more instrument with which to carry out the project.

    VIVA SANTA LIBERATA is a record that was created as a tribute to women’s singing, in particular narrative singing, another branch of the female repertoire that has fallen into almost total disuse.

    The songs of mothers and daughters, grandmothers and mothers-in-law, sisters and aunts, cummari, majare and soothsayers, midwives and nannies, complainers, healers; the song of girls and ‘teachers of water.’

    The title was born from a provocative play on words in relation to the iconography of the feminine in Christian cultures, proposing a synthesis of the dualism between virginal sacrifice and chastity on the one hand, and self-determination and sexual freedom on the other.

    Santa Liberata

    Santa Liberata claims her atavistic freedom, starting from sexual freedom, the source of all her other powers connected to life and its balance, in the cyclical nature of time, and her source is the fountain of Living Water.

    Santa Liberata (in Sicilian “Libbirata”) is the character that continues to guide my work in the last two years. She presents herself in appearance as the Catholic saints, and requires the usual celebrations reserved for the patron saints, such as Santa Rosalia in Palermo and Santa Agata in Catania, that is, required at the annual preparation of a Fistinu, in which her qualities and merits are magnified and her precepts divulged.

    PART II – A World Music Festival in Sicily

    But the Fistinu is not only this, it is an enterprise involving dozens of artists, workers and associations that have joined my adventurous proposal to build an event around the music, which puts at the centre the idea of a healthier community: a mixed community in which identities and traditions intersect, intertwine and develop; a concrete community that integrates with the natural world; that welcomes it in a symbiotic and non-competitive way, rebuilding the good traditional ecological practices.

    So in 2020 the FISTINU DI SANTA LIBBIRATA – Musik Du Munn was born.

    It is the heritage of our ancestors; a community of individuals aware of their right to well-being, to care for themselves according to their own free choice, as symbolized by the medicinal hemp, symbol and ornament of Santa Libbirata; an idea of liberation of conscience that starts from the liberation of women, and for this Santa Libbirata.

    The Fistinu is an event in which people can find the beneficial dimmension of the participatory FESTIVAL, using the traditional techniques of music, song and dance.

    The feast is an occasion in which people dance together, as a communal rite of reintegration of well-being ‘individual through the collective and collective through the individual.’

    The popular or folk music has among its functions to bring together the community in a particular occasion, merging together in an experience of total participation, physical, mental and emotional, with the support of rhythm and song; each tradition retains its key to open the doors of participation through dance and song, a ritual and archaic dimension that helps to recreate social harmony and community well-being.

    We endeavoured to recreate a tradition of FESTIVAL in Sicily, which in addition to supporting itself through the indigenous cultural traditions, such as the contradanza or the ballittu, inevitably recreates itself by opening and dialoguing with other musical traditions, the cultures that coexist in Sicily today, which can point a magnifying glass on the processes of migration and cultural metissage.

    Cultural Crossroads

    Looking at the past, centuries of real experience of cultural cross-fertilization between different and distant traditions – including Arabs, Vikings, Greeks, French, Turks and Americans – are the basis on which Sicily’s own musical tradition, the most archaic, has been constituted.

    Looking at the present, Sicily is the junction and crossroads of the great migrations of the third millennium, on its territory different experiences and cultural languages continue to meet, dialogue and merge.

    Since the third millennium A.D. began we have witnessed the transformation of the whole world. There are no longer borders for information, culture, fashions (unfortunately still too many borders for the dignity of human beings on the move): inevitably the transformation leads to global métissage.

    The culture of global métissage is like a river in which everything is mixed; if the course is too wide, values sink and rot at the bottom, the surface becomes one sterile insignificant reality, enslaved to the market and the economic system; but if the course is alive, the identity of our ancestors does not fade in the midst of everything, but is enlivened alongside the others – roots that intertwine and strengthen each other.

    Then the métissage becomes our strength, the new strength of the individual of the future.

    SI LU CHIù FORTI A’SSIRI SCANNATU
    LU CHIù DIBULIDDU E VOGGHIU ESSIRI

    SI LA PETRA FERMA A’SSIRI MARTIDDATA
    COMU ACQUA CHI CURRI E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
    C’ARRIFRISCANNU SCURRI E UNN’è DI NUDDU 

    L’ACQUA CURRI SUPRA LA MUNTAGNA
    SCURRI LENTA MA PASSANNU CANCIA
    CANCIA IDDA E CANCIA LA MUNTAGNA
    LENTAMENTI L’ACQUA LA TRASFORMA

    The music of cultural identity, of the roots, the language and the words of our ancestors, contain within themselves a permanent force. This is like water that flows and slowly manages to shape even the rock, which can allow us women and men of today to face the contemporary world with love, to bring our positive contribution to the creation of the society that is currently getting out of hand.

    Micro Identity

    That’s why I want to continue to sing in Sicilian, and not only in Sicily, in Italy, and in the whole world. The micro-identity doesn’t close, doesn’t stop and doesn’t die out, but can be offered to the world without fear, allowing us to open up and confront each other, bringing knowledge, esteem and enrichment that strengthens all our resolve.

    And I want to meet and get to know closely your stories in your dialects and your songs and dances, to be able to see the strength of the recognition of the message: Acqua di stu chiaru fonti, that secret that has been handed down to us from the past of generations by our Ave.

    CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
    S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI

    FUNTANA DI BIDDIZZI E D’ACQUA CHIARA
    CA CU CI BIVI CI LASSA LA MENTI
    UNDI CAMINI TU L’ARIA SCARA
    PERNI E DOMANTI SU LI TO SBANNENTI
    DI TUTTI LI FUNTANI SI CHIù RARA
    E SUNNU L’ACQUI TOI LI CHIù LUCENTI
    PRI TIA LA TIRRA STISSA SI PRIPARA
    LARGA LU MARI CISSANU LI VENTI

    CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
    S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI

    FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI ARANCI
    NA BEDDA COMU A VUI NUN SI PO PINCIRI

    FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI D’ANCILI
    CUI PASSA DI STA STRATA LU FA MPINCIRI
    TU SI FUNTANA DI TUTTI BILLIZZI

    NTRA LU TO STICCHIU C’E LA MIDICINA
    QUANTU MALATI C’è TANTU NNI SANA
    C’A LI MALATI LIVATI LA SITI
    A CHIDDI MORTI LI RISUSCITATI

    CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
    S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI

    Speaking to the Ancestors

    But from what past are the ancestors speaking to us? Or rather, how far back is this past from which these rhymes emerge? The rhymes speak of a feminine entity superior to the human dimension, whom one addresses face to face, like a mother or a companion, but whose praises are sung in music, as to a Goddess. It is an emergence of the prehistoric Mediterranean Culture of Mothers.

    Digging into history, I wondered when it happened, and how such an unbalanced way of life took over; I was lucky enough to discover the work of prehistoric archaeology by Marija Gimbutas, who reinterpreted prehistory, in particular the time period between 3000 and 2000 BC.

    This was before a prolonged period of invasion, when a different culture was widespread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, up to Ireland. From the archaeological data, she concluded this was non-hierarchical, mutualistic, and based on the balance with the natural elements, in which women kept the most valuable skills related to survival, and were responsible for the welfare of the community.

    Wayne Dyer called this Gilanic culture, joining equally the Greek roots: -gyn feminine and -an masculine with the unifying letter lambda.

    Extra-Europeans

    There was a time when those who now pretend to be the original indigenous citizens of Europe were only the new comers, the ‘Extra-Europeans’ of the past. They established their presence by means of wars and violence, trying to destroy or to exploit for their own aims the civilisation they found. They have been trying since then to impose their own single set of truths, values, gods. Now we can say that they failed in doing so at least for two basic reasons: first, we are still here to prove the existence of that earlier civilization, the goddess civilization, because they cut and burnt the trees but didn’t eradicate their/our roots; secondly, what has been achieved through violence and a monocentric male paradigm of dominance is a society based on malaise, destruction and death without regeneration and growth. Now we need a new science, a new politics and a new history, that is no more just his–story.

    What have been called disdainfully ‘matriarchal studies’ indicate that egalitarian forms of social structures have existed in the past and are still in existence today in some parts of the world. In ‘matriarchies’ women are at the centre of culture without ruling over other members of society: their aim is not to have power over other people and over the natural world, but to have the power to nurture cultural life based on mutual respect.

    …

    Our task, therefore, is to transform the hope originating from all these discoveries about our Archaic Past into bursting energy to Realize now, as Mary Daly calls it, our Archaic Future.

    Luciana Percovich, Barcelona, 2003.

    So I found the tangle of the skein, and what’s more, I found myself with the thread in my hand. When a woman finds herself with a thread in her hand, the archaic instinct is to start weaving.

    And from time immemorial, you have to involve others to weave together, if the fabric is endlessly wide.

    Weaving then, it is in that time that songs are born: it is there that the story is always made goddess.

    This is what Percovich means by Her-story. But let’s go in order.

    Tangle of the Skein

    The tangle of the skein is in this nebulous prehistory, out of which for decades now has emerged a new truthful narrative that speaks of a better world, or at least another possible one, through the archaeological evidence of a culture that refers to and strongly overlaps with the Utopia of the twentieth century, a better world, Huxley’s Island.

    It opens a glimmer of hope: they almost convinced us that we are losers, utopians for an equalitarian and mutualistic world, they corroded our confidence in the ideal, and instead we have the archaeological evidence of the Neolithic, up to the Minoan culture in Crete, as witnesses of a better world.

    And we know that this culture that was its bearer has been overwhelmed and prevaricated by an invading culture, which continues to prevail.

    Once we have assumed this fact, the rest is all downhill, we simply need to reinterpret all that we known, and all that we will still learn with a new key, free from the intent of the dominant culture to make us slaves and oppressed, forgetting our identity. We haven’t been taught and told where we really came from, now we have to sew up the whole thread of history, to regain strength and courage, and self-confidence, and build our better world. Our archaic-future.

    The Culture of the Mothers

    The thread, I was saying, I found it in my hand. Digging into the archaeology of Sicilian songs, we can find these poetic fragments clearly ascribable to the spirituality of this culture of the Mothers, gilanic, and connected to the cult of Water and Waters: they are the retropapiri of our spiritual and ritual repertoire!

    They can be a nucleus around which to sew up the fragments of memories of songs that have managed to reach us from this archaic culture, and by recomposing a fabric, we contribute to the re-emergence of a cultural identity in which we can feel at ease and heartened by our true roots.

    Sicily is like a cauldron, the seething cauldron in which the cultural interactions between the migrant populations of history and the wandering of the merchants in the Mediterranean have stratified: among the sediments there are traces of cultural persistence of an ancient, prehistoric culture that unites us and reflects us: the culture of the Mothers.

    It is the land of the golden apples, perhaps here rests hidden the Fata Morgana. If she is resting here, she is resting behind a magic mirror, and Circe is singing to call back from sleep all the sirens of the sea and invite them to a feast.

    Women, says the song, let’s take back our customs, the feast must be done at least once a year, the feast where we can sing and dance and meet to tell our stories and our songs. In order not to disappear, to prevent our culture from dying out.

    It is for this reason that from Sicily SANTA LIBERATA SENDS AN APPEAL.

    From Sicily to all the islands, both territorial and cultural: sisters we are, capitals of cultural persistence!

    In us is the germ of resistance, if after so many millennia we can still resist with a memory of the stories, voices and songs of our ancestors, who handed down their island culture.

    We bring together in a project a path of meetings of songs and sharing, a project of permanent chorus of the archaic feminine, we constitute an OPIRA OF PUPE.

    Singers and performers, bearers of traditions, passionate, willing weavers, Santa Liberata is building the road, from Rome to Sicily. Spring 2022.

    Contact me here.

  • Musician of the Month: Ian Fisher

    Foreword

    Sometime in early 2022, in the middle of the fourth or fortieth wave of the corona virus, I got a message from my old friend, Stefano Schiavocampo.  He told me that he was editing for a magazine in Dublin and he’d like me to contribute.

    “Me?” I thought, “What would anyone need to hear from me?” In finishing this abstract essay now, that thought still hasn’t changed much. 

    To be honest I basically just wrote it for him. I hadn’t seen Stefano in over five years. In my memory he’ll always be on fire in the eyes and still at heart. The eternal street musician, at home in the overgrowth of roads less traveled and Tuscan villas. The tarred fingers rolling Belgian anarchist squat cigarettes. The boules champion of mid-evil French castles with a perennial beer frothed mustache grin forever fresh from an Irish dive. 

    Though the thought of him is once again on my mind, I still don’t know where he and his family are today. Let’s say Dublin for lack of a better guess. I like to put him there, so I can dream myself back to that place. That rough little city of rain and song. The idea of an audience has become too abstract to imagine over the last two years of separation, so I write these words less to the faceless you and more for my old friend Stefano and my city of maybes; Dublin.

    Before the Storm

    I’m going to assume that you don’t know me. There are pretty few justifiable reasons why you would unless you were in south-eastern Florida in the late 1980’s. If so, then do you remember that hospital by the beach where it was forever womb warm? Where it’d get so hot it’d cook up thunder every afternoon like the one I was born on before the storm. If you weren’t there, then do you remember being out on that pier while I was making my first memory looking up at a spaceship drawing a cloud into the sky when the wind threw my hat into the waves and I was caught right before jumping in by my mom. Remember that skateboarding Mickey Mouse hat? It was great, right?

    If you were there, then you obviously can’t forget dad’s accident and mom’s cancer. The Damocles Sword and an uprooting from coast to corn fields. Canned laughter on TV. Being a big brother. Fitting in and testing boundaries. Rejection at a grade-school dance. Starting a band in your basement. Remember those Nirvana covers and a new name every week (Sideburns Magoo, Brothers from Different Mothers, etc…)? Power chords turned to fingerpicking.

    Time went marching and the coddled underwing turned to an opening curtain on the other side of the world. Graduating from structure to be reborn and blinded drunk talking Marx smoking through every bar and backstage back and forth between Berlin and Vienna, with something to prove and not much to do it with.

    You might have been there and might remember more than me. If you weren’t, then there are songs I forget that we can use to remember.

    So, so many songs. Used to show you my world. Used to make me what I wanted to be. Used to understand what I was feeling. To put words to the wordless. Then sing and sing and sing again till hoarse. Surrendering nightly to and follow behind powerlessly contorting to the shape of a stage-light shadow of a past me or a mimicked subconscious idol.

    Pic ©Andreas Jakwerth

    Onwards the Same

    Remember when all the hope of youth ran out of greener grass to graze on? Maybe it happened to you too. Waking up in a small room of a shared apartment wondering “why here and how forward?”

    Stubbornly stagnated sticking to a dream no longer dreamt and fattened by vices lazing low below the horizon of what dreams may come. Onward the same. Onward the same. Feet in a world changing and a skull shat full by boomers. Heavy-headed limbo walking closer and closer to the ground. Raging inside rolling and worming across a world of drying sidewalks. The friction of blue-eyed ambitions rubbing up against obstacles of age.

    Sparking and humming the subtle melodies sap slowly out of fall trees. We have felt the fretboard for a resolving chord. Not knowing the notes we play, but knowing only if they sound right. Those human feelings passing from you to something beyond.  Slowly they launch like drops of sweat evaporating up into clouds to rain on far off fields. The songs faintly rumble in the internal distant thunder of night. The sound of little universes being born. A world of meaning in a moment.

    Pic ©Andreas Jakwerth

    Though I have assumed that you don’t know me and I not you, a storm is born from all but itself and a creation never comes alone. Creation is an act of sharing. To sense is to share. To share yourself. To share in someone else. To give and receive simultaneously. To connect. In spite of the distance between us now. In spite of this world where we are all apart. To bridge the gaps in the voids inside of us and between us with an honest act of creation is one of the few real beauties we have. Where we are a part of each other. To remember we are one. I’m trying to remember. Do you? Remind me.

    — Ian Fisher is a songwriter, performer, and recording artist raised in Missouri, USA, and living between Germany and Austria. Rolling Stone magazine describes his music as “half Americana and half Abbey Road-worthy pop”.  He has written nearly two thousand songs while touring Europe, the USA, and Africa.  You can listen to his most recent album, “American Standards”, on his website (www.ianfishersongs.com/music) or on any streaming site and you can support his music by joining him at www.fanklub.com/ianfishersongs. Fisher is currently working in Sicily on a new collection of intimate songs for an album to be released this November.

    All Images © Andreas Jakwerth

  • Musician of the Month: Hugo Vasco Reis

    The process of discovering sounds has always been an aspect of music I’ve been connected to, even when I wasn’t aware of its potential and possibilities. During childhood and adolescence, I experimented with instruments, recorded and improvised. It was a somewhat chaotic, intuitive process without pretensions.

    In my early teens my parents offered me a classical guitar and a few weeks later a friend lent me an electric one. With these instruments, my conscious interest in music really began. I mostly listened to heavy metal bands.

    I began subscribing to guitar magazines, mainly from Germany and the United States, with exercises by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, and spent hours listening to the solos of Metallica and other bands I liked.

    When I went to university to study civil engineering in Porto, Portugal, in addition to academic studies, I attended to the Porto Jazz School (electric guitar) and later the Conservatory of Music of Porto (Portuguese guitar – the instrument I play currently).

    I completed the civil engineering course and worked for seven years in this sector. During this period, I was always connected to music, but the time came when I decided to reduce my engineering activity and dedicate myself fully to music.

    I wanted to deepen my knowledge in composition. So I moved from Porto to Lisbon to study composition at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. During this time, I studied contemporary music during the day, and played Portuguese guitar in Fado houses at night. The musical scope was very wide, as these two musical universes have many differences. Sometimes I had difficulty dealing with it but on the other hand it was also an effective way of not being absorbed in the same music all the time.

    After that I studied for a Master in composition in Switzerland with Isabel Mundry at the Zurich University of Arts, with a scholarship from the Fondation Nicati-de Luze, and in Germany with Stefan Prins and Mark André at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden.

    I also had private classes and masterclasses with composers Toshio Hosokawa, Chaya Czernowin, Hans Tutschku, Dieter Ammann, Franck Bedrossian, Zigmunt Krauze, Åke Parmerud, Carola Bauckholt, Klaus Lang, Peter Ablinger, among others.

    During my studies in composition, I investigated different forms of musical creation, their relationship with other arts, and had my works performed. It was a new and exciting world.

    Currently, I’m working on contemporary music daily and methodically, which implies research, listening, reading and trans-disciplinarity. I’m based in Zurich (Switzerland) and Porto (Portugal), and travelling regularly around Europe to collaborate with musicians, ensembles, fine and visual artists performing and recording my works. I’m also researching on surrounding sounds: from figuration to deformation.

    Website: www.hugovascoreis.com

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hugo_vasco_reis/

    Bandcamp: https://hugovascoreis.bandcamp.com/

    Cover artwork by Yari Ostovany

    About New Album: “Voices and Landscapes”

    “Voices and Landscapes” is an album that includes five works, composed for different instrumentations, in which the voice is the common element, present in all the pieces.

    The central theme of this album is the landscape, which led me to research diversified sounds ranging from nature to urban places, totally shaped by human action. I was also influenced by poems by Antero de Quental and Fernando Pessoa.

    The work was supported by Ministry of Culture of Portugal, DGArtes, SPAutores and Antena 2 (Portuguese classical radio).

    Programme Notes

    ‘Some Lines Mixing a Color’

    for soprano, saxophone, accordion, viola and violoncello

    performed by Síntese GMC

    ‘Some Lines Mixing a Color’ is a work that started from a photograph taken by the composer during a rigorous winter day, where the dense fog covered the shapes of nature. This piece addresses the influence of the invisible in relation to the human perception of the image. By mediating the image with the sound, dense lines and random structures were created, that coexist in the same space with fine lines and organized sound material, leading perception and memory to different places, in a dialogue of counterpoint, gestures, intuition and events, which shape time and form.

    listen here: https://hugovascoreis.bandcamp.com/track/some-lines-mixing-a-color

    Fernando Pessoa em pintura de Bottelho

    ‘Paisagens, Quero-as Comigo’

    for flute, clarinet, percussion, harp, piano, mezzo-soprano, violin, viola and violoncello

    Performed by Grupo de Música Contemporânea de Lisboa

    Conducted by Pedro Neves

    Based on the poem ‘Paisagens, Quero-as Comigo’ by Fernando Pessoa, this is a work composed for an ensemble of nine musicians. “Landscapes, I want them with me / Landscapes, pictures that are… / Waving wheat laurel, / Sun beacons that I follow, / Bad sky, reeds, solitude… / Some by the hand of God, / Others by the hands of fairies, / Others by chance of mine, / Others by memories given… / Landscapes… Memories, / Because even what you see / With first impressions / At some point was what it is, / In the cycle of sensations. / Landscapes… Anyway, the content / Of what is here is the street / Where the good sun of torpor / That insinuates in my soul / I don’t see anything better.” by Fernando Pessoa.

    listen here

    https://hugovascoreis.bandcamp.com/track/paisagens-quero-as-comigo

    ‘Sleeping Landscapes’

    for choir

    Performed by Nova Era Vocal Ensemble

    Conducted by João Barros

    ‘Sleeping Landscapes’ is a piece for choir inspired by excerpts from poems by Bernardo Soares, taken from Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet). It was composed in Tronco, a small village in the municipality of Chaves (Portugal), where contact with the natural landscape is permanent and, at times, because it feels so original, it seems to be asleep.

    I came from prodigious lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself, but I never spoke of those lands, except to myself, and told no one of the landscapes glimpsed in dreams. … I see my dreamed landscapes as clearly as I see the real ones. When I lean over to look into my dreams, I am leaning over something real. When I see life passing, I am also dreaming something.
    Bernardo Soares.

    listen here:

    https://hugovascoreis.bandcamp.com/track/sleeping-landscapes

    Photograph of Antero de Quental, c. 1887.

    ‘Oceano Nox’

    for soprano, flute, violoncello and piano

    Performed by Borealis Ensemble

    Based on the poem ‘Oceano Nox’ by Antero de Quental, this is a work composed for a chamber group that includes soprano, bass flute, cello and piano, where gestures, timbre, the phenomenon of object/event and transformation of sound through resonance are the criteria that mediate the poem and the sound. “Beside the sea, which hoarsely sent its great / The tragic voice to landward, while the wind / It passed like the flight of a thought / Which seeks and hesitates, restless and intermittent, / Beside the sea I sate disconsolate, / Scanning the sullen sky with mist-clouds lined, / And, in my revery, questioned the lament / That rose from things, vaguely… / What restless whim disquiets you, / O forces obscure, and beings that begin to be? / What thought is that which moves you in your courses? / But from the vast horizon, where doth hide / Forever the Unconscious, comes to me / A roar, a distant plaint, and naught beside…” by Antero de Quental.

    listen here:

    https://hugovascoreis.bandcamp.com/track/oceano-nox

    ‘Polyphonic Mass’

    for speaking voices and electronics

    Performed by Hugo Vasco Reis and Choir of Native Speakers

    ‘Polyphonic Mass’ is a work of field recordings that aims to investigate and understand the properties of common sounds we hear in everyday life, which, in principle, are neglected, as they do not assume a major importance in our hearing. These field recordings are also an opportunity to create a distancing from traditional patterns, looking for a different plan to work the sound and make the collected material detach from a image or situation in particular, joining sounds that are apparently unrelated. The perception of neglected sounds creates a status quo phenomenon, as a criterion for the creation of this work, which goes from figuration to sound deformation. Thus, elements of a present time and a place, or several places, are combined, which convey the fragility of everyday situations, their ritualization, polyphony, impulse, density and prosody as elements of musical discourse.

    listen here:

    https://hugovascoreis.bandcamp.com/track/polyphonic-mass

  • Musician of the Month: Justina Jaruševičiūtė

    I sit at the piano and a melody flows smoothly from my mind. I think “How great,” and quickly write it down, then continue playing and writing, playing and writing. Feels like I came up with something special this time. I become emotional with excitement and am very pleased. Then a moment passes, and nothingness. Thick darkness appears in front of me, as I realize that I am lying warm and cosy under the black sheets on my bed.

    It was just a dream, again. And again I awaken, unable to remember the notes I had just dreamily composed. This is getting exhausting. A nightmare in reality. Again.

    These dreams happen frequently when I am unable to compose for a period. Naturally, having downtime to put thoughts and emotions together is necessary for every artist. But sometimes the pause is much too long. The more I think in music, the more I feel in music, the more it builds in my head and must be released.

    Sometimes I’m not even sure if I want to write music, or if I have to. Most of the time, it feels as though I have no choice. Melodies and harmonies; they take up so much space in my head. Growing and developing inside, they need to come out. And I have little control over it, so I comply and write it down.

    The most joyful feeling I have is when I say to myself “Ok, looks like I have finished this piece.”

    My debut album ‘Silhouettes’ contains ten pieces for string quartet. You will find a vivid example of my compulsion to write music in a piece called ‘Warum?’. The story behind this composition is sad, yet philosophical. Walking in a small Berlin park at the side of a cemetery, I came to a wall beside a few small gravestones lying in a row. Looking closer, I noticed from the dates that there were small children buried there.

    Nearby, I hear many kids running around, laughing. Observing children happily playing and joyfully screaming with their peers under ground was a surreal moment. The juxtaposition engendered such strong emotions that I ran home to write them out of myself.

    Another piece, called ‘Prayer’, came about spontaneously on a dark and rainy autumn evening. My mind was strained by feelings of longing and hopelessness, sadness and madness. I let them gush out, in tears and notes.

    Most of my inspiration to write music comes from the world that surrounds me. I observe it daily on walks, in talks and relationships, reading news and watching events unravel. My music reflects all these emotions. Often, however, global events, leave me too upset to compose.

    On these occasions I wish to hide from it all, to calm down. I like to imagine myself living on a farm somewhere, far away from everything, with a cat and a dog, growing my own vegetables.

    It probably sounds like I have a love/hate relationship with music, but ‘Silhouettes’ was a turning point in my life – the fruition of a lifelong road in composition. The album was a long time coming despite a connection to music from early childhood, when my parents first took me to the music school.

    Naturally, neither of them could have imagined the path I would take, nor would either of them have wanted me to have fallen under this spell. Now, after years of singing in choirs and playing many instruments (piano, guitar, violin, percussion, bagpipes), I fondly remember myself as a young teenager, sitting at the piano, writing my first pieces, thinking how I wanted to become a composer or a conductor.

    I knew, even then, that I was not a performer, or at least I wasn’t able to discover MY instrument. But I always felt strongly that music was something I wanted to be connected to, that I wanted to dig deep into; that I wanted to understand from other perspectives – that I wanted to create.

    https://soundcloud.com/pianoandcoffeerecords/reminiscence?si=66ba5b8d20c2413490bdc140f2b3694f

    Back then, perhaps I was afraid of the powerful feelings composing awakens. I don’t know. In the end, I selected sound design and engineering and dove deep into my studies. It was those significant experiences that are still helping me in many professional and conventional situations today.

    Unfortunately, working with sound was never very comfortable for me. I spent my life looking to lose myself in one activity or another (I am still very passionate about photography, for example), but have since seen that nothing works as well for my mind as writing music.

    At one time, I wanted to become a tattoo artist. I had been drawing and painting for many years and had even tattooed my own legs. For whatever reason, I left this idea behind (at least for now, but who knows in the future?).

    I still regularly paint and draw, trying out different styles. It’s an important activity for me. I enjoy using watercolours and acrylics the most. Painting has one enormous benefit: I can listen to music while creating.

    My musical taste may seem a little strange since I enjoy looping the same albums or songs, for hours or even days. But I can’t listen to music simply in the background – even when I loop something. I live the music every single time.

    Throughout childhood, I listened more to classical music and different metal bands. But over the last few years, my playlists consist mostly of contemporary classical music, black metal, and Nick Cave. Recently, I’ve added a little techno, ambient and drone. But, one thing has always been clear to me: silence is the best music. And rain.

    For two years, after completing my studies, I managed concerts in a classical music concert hall in Klaipeda. It was amazing working with musicians and composers from all over the world, as well as seeing two or three concerts a week.

    Now I think about how every concert I’ve been a part of and all of the music I’ve listened to were lessons in themselves. They have directly contributed to my current compositional work.

    In 2018, after many ups and downs and changing cities every two years (who wants to hear about my experience living in Moscow?), I began to seriously devote myself to composing. Leaving my past behind, I moved from Lithuania to Berlin, a city that I had only visited twice before, and where I didn’t know another person.

    So I began writing music upon my arrival and in the early days of 2020 I released my first piece for strings, ‘Rituals’, which was inspired by Baltic mythology, folk music, and nature.

    One year on came the release of the aforementioned debut album, ‘Silhouettes’, under the wonderful care of the Piano and Coffee Records label. I’m glad to say that the album was very well received and continues to touch people’s hearts. That makes me extremely happy, and certainly motivates me to keep moving forward.

    As regards the future, to quote Jonas Mekas: ‘I have no idea what winds are driving me and where.’ Now, I am just grateful to be able to work on what I want. Whether it’s writing a new piece or allowing myself to live a slow life. I realise that this is a luxury for many and feel lucky to be able to enjoy it.

    What comes later I do not know. But one thing is certain: new music will be coming out and hopefully soon.

    Follow Justina Jaruševičiūtė on:

    Bandcamp

    Spotify

    Instagram

    Facebook

  • Musician of the Month: Alain Servant

    Two months ago, after releasing my new album, Songs & Stories,Vol 1, I asked Irish composer Craig Cox to listen and offer his thoughts, without any prompting from me. Craig and I have worked together on several projects since I arrived in Ireland in 2012. His response resonated with me, so I will comment on parts of it here in order to explain my background, and what led me to write these songs.

    The music on Alain Servant’s new album is a synthesis of his years of artistic vagrancy.

    Vagrancy! This is a word that well summarises my artistic path. I started in theatre as an actor in my early teens and, at the age of sixteen, with eight friends, created a theatre company called ‘Tour de Babel’ (Tower of Babel). This adventure continued for over fifteen years. After moving from the Parisian underground scene to the French countryside, we created more than twenty shows, with the aim of meeting other cultures and using theatre as an intercultural laboratory. We always worked in collaboration with artists from other cultures, simultaneously immersing ourselves in them as we went along.

    As an actor, director and musician, I was able to incorporate practices and visions from the Mediterranean world (Lebanon and Tunisia), Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Cuba), Asia (India and China) and Europe. I discovered Indian Classical music and started practicing the sarod

    Then the Turkish Oud.

    But all adventures must come to an end! The company split up and we all parted on our own paths. I next created a residency space for artists in the countryside in France where all arts and artistic movements were welcome to create and experiment. Over a period of ten years, I met and practiced with clowns, jugglers, acrobats, theatre makers, butoh dancers…

    The residencies continue.

    Then, I arrived in Ireland! This island has become for me not only a personal nest but also a place in which to focus my practice.

    Alain’s practice is fundamentally one based in narrative: his craft is the construction of worlds that hold up a warped mirror to the familiar, placing the listener inside an ethereal realm in which everything is distorted yet illuminated.

    I am a storyteller. I am also an actor, writer and musician. In Ireland, I found that songwriting was a way of merging my practices. My head is filled with myths and stories, and I found in Ireland a fertile land for my imagination to blossom.

    The dark earth and the cold sea have allowed the seeds of strange plants that I have carried all my life to take root in a peaceful garden, the poisonous and the medicinal growing side by side.

    I sit now in this garden, picking these fruits and becoming intoxicated with their smells and the memories they recall in me. I am present in the here and now, but many dimensions overlap. And I sing my perceptions as they arise.

    An appropriate adjective for this album is “multi-lingual”. Not simply in reference to the actual shifts between European tongues (so that the inherent musicality of language is demonstrated, it becoming a texture in itself), but also in reference to the musical world. 

    I have no real mother tongue. I spent my early childhood in Bolivia, speaking Spanish and listening the indigenous people speaking Quechua and Aymara. Arriving in France in Marseille, I learned French with a strong southern accent, then moved to Paris and, although fascinated by Classical French literature and poetry, I spent most of my time hanging around with the kids of my quartier learning argot, the Parisian slang that was very much alive at the time. And then English came for me, a language that seems to fit the songs I sing.

    A language is a way of seeing the world, as well as its music, different frequencies that don’t strike the soul’s strings in the same way. It is not necessarily the language that drives me, but rather the language revealing itself through whatever the subject is. A rock in a high mountain sings in Spanish, and a tree by a gentle river in French. What language would a bottle of whiskey lying in the gutter speak? I am this rock, this tree and this bottle of whiskey!

    House of the Pomegrantes (bandcamp). https://alainservant.bandcamp.com/album/a-house-of-pomegranates

    Moving through this album is like rolling through the shifting narrative structure of a dream, each track morphing into the next so that an overall tone manifests and an internal metaphorical logic constructed, with references to flowers, flowing water and undeath mushrooming and acting as way points that trick the listener’s memory while revealing the underlying subtext of an almost squalid hopefulness: a unique wisdom that weaves piss and vinegar parables, speaking reassurances in hoarse tones.

    For me, any creative act is a journey into the subconscious world. I jump into unknown depths and come back laughing, clutching some new treasures that become songs or something else. In these depths, I meet gods, kings and queens, slaves, even children playing with wild animals…

    Any new creation is a cathartic process that brings me back to a world of wonder. The logic emerges by itself with no conscious will. I try to follow the natural movement of expansion and contraction. And it can be hard work! As hard as the craft of the blacksmith at times. Because art is a craft, and demands skills, experience and practice.

    I would like to conclude with a word on collaboration. Collaboration is essential for me.  The creative process at times can be solitary, but becomes useless if there’s no transformation through exchange.

    I was lucky in Ireland to encounter John Linnane, one of the best musicians and performers I have ever met.

    Since 2017, we have worked together and performed together and I would like to thank him, not only because he’s a great artist, but also because he’s a great human being. It is an honour to have him beside me in this adventure.

    Link to most recent album: https://alainservant.bandcamp.com/

    Thanks to Zoë O’Reilly for corrections (and there were plenty!), and to Craig Cox for his text, the full version is here: https://www.facebook.com/alainservantmusic.

    Photo: Alain Servant & John Linnane
    Credit: Yoram Allon.

  • Musician of the Month: John Moods

    I go by the name of John Moods.

    I would like to share with you a little journey through my current thoughts – a small piece of my ever-shifting consciousness.

    Through my life’s journey I have come to realise that the source of my anxiety always stems from not knowing something. What I am, who I am, where I am and where I am going. Every bit of my identity that can be described with human language is a construct. I am here typing these words, my inner being looking out through the eyes of my head onto the screen. I am on a planet floating through the universe, and sometimes when I’m lucky I am able to know that I know very little.

    Where does the mystery begin? Where does it end? I could say I know everything about an apple. I’m familiar with it. But it is also a sacred object, with an unimaginable design. It is a mysterious expression of cosmic creativity, made from the building blocks of the universe. The same cosmic code that constitutes you and me. Every time I start to think about anything, no matter how mundane, the deeper I go with it, I always reach the same place. Behind everything there’s a gigantic world of not knowing. Everything we know is just the tip of an iceberg.

    I equally don’t know why I chose music over everything else. It just attracted me like a magnet. I never get tired of it. Recently I began to understand the magic of words a little better and I’m dabbling in poetry, which for the first time I am enjoying immensely. I am convinced that language (including this text) is utterly confusing and misleading. I believe poetry is the only true language as it simulates accurately the workings of the subconscious mind, and therefore it feels more true than the forest of symbols we usually operate within.

    I have released one album of music so far called “The Essential John Moods”. I have written and recorded two more since then, but I feel I’m only now approaching deeper layers of songwriting. I am also certain that I’ll never get anywhere. At least nowhere close to a destination. I think of my life and my relationship with music as a creative odyssey.

    Growing up middle class in Germany in the 1980s, the son of a judge and a Polish Homeopath, I have been slowly simmering in the soup of late twentieth century post-spiritual materialism like many my peers. My parents were a little into church, a little into Yoga, a little into science, but generally as confused in life as anyone else. Death was rarely mentioned, and if it was its presence was so heavy that one could almost feel the temperature drop in the room. There was no lightness to death, and I learned to regard it as something foreign; always avoiding the topic in conversation.

    My parents were, and are, lovely people, but back then they just didn’t know what to teach me about life’s purpose. They wanted me to have good grades and do well in life, but spiritually they were just beginning their own journeys, and their messages were mixed or confused. I literally had no idea why I ought to do anything in life. For a while I moved through it cluelessly or mechanically. Definitely the relative wealth of my upbringing (never a lot of money but never existential scarcity) made it possible for me to float and feel depressed.

    It was only through my own confrontation with this question of death in a non-intellectual, more holistic way and a great deal of suffering that I grew more in touch with the finite beauty of life and realized that the absence of death was like a severed limb, an absence ultimately rendering life meaningless.

    And these were just my personal experiences. But of course I am just a part of the human family and this eventually led me to think about the state of consciousness of the world I grew up in, and live in today. So what is the consciousness of our current time? How are the majority of people dealing with the problem of not knowing? And why do we seem largely incapable of admitting how little we really know about life?

    I always found it impressive to hear highly intelligent people such as Fritjof Capra, Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg utter humble statements, outlining the limits of their knowledge. There is so much fear hidden behind human surety. When we can’t admit what we don’t know, we will never truly be able to accept the great unknown and flourish in it. Instead we will try to conquer it, label and name things and in the process pretend that we have already mastered it.

    Never in human history has it been easier to look away from the sacred and the mysterious. Our bodies know it more than our intellects. Everything is always in flux and the creative expression of cosmic intelligence flows through us all. But it’s easy to be comfortable and distracted these days, as we are supplied with a constant steam of digital bread and circus by large corporations… Netflix, Facebook, endless TV shows, swipe right, double click to like. It has many shapes and names. It’s a complex web of distractions set up to turn us into mindless pleasure seekers and to direct our gaze away from the mystery.

    So the question that I, along with many of my contemporaries, now ask ourselves, is how do we get away from a world where we dominate nature through a fear that expresses itself in short-term greed, selfishness, and which is devoid of a deeper meaning?

    My personal and practical answers are: look at death; look at nature; listen to the silence; look at the limits of knowledge; try to find poetry and wonder again. Psychedelics are a wonderful pathway to the mystery. Spending more time wandering in the wild is always good. Look at what indigenous peoples have done for thousands of years sustainably, gently taking and giving back to nature. We need better ideas than those ascendant today. We require subversive joy in the face of immanent death and demise.

    Thank you very much for reading, and I wish you a wonderful life!

    Here’s a poem I recently wrote:

    The Unspeakable

    You’re a being of light and time
    now the universe
    is opening its mind
    to let you in
    to the other side
    where the streets are empty
    no cars
    nothing left behind
    let’s take a ride
    morning’s broken
    it was a long night
    we’re standing in the doorway
    of an old beginning
    in a new design
    and a new god to pray to
    in a branded shrine
    praying to the mundane
    but keep finding the divine
    even with a blind eye
    you can see how it all combines
    where beauty and disaster
    intertwine
    how a storm sometimes can help your mind
    to communicate with the undefined
    the things you can never say even if you tried
    what’s rotten and raw
    what’s deep and macabre
    what’s infinite slow
    the words that don’t grow
    what you cannot let go
    the places inside
    unspeakable things
    unspeakable mind
    how it grinds and grinds
    the unstoppable device
    even if you slow the ride
    it’ll rapidly unwind
    the machinery of time
    when you’re the sensitive kind
    likely to get undermined
    it just hurts sometimes
    to see humankind
    scared and unaligned
    afraid of the breathing of the night
    a world of wrongs
    turned into a world of rights
    an animal so lost in sight
    confusing darkness with the light
    but maybe it will all clear up in time
    and the storm will pass us by
    another animal assigned
    to read the signs
    while the sun still shines
    on more disaster, more design
    more unspeakable words
    of an unspeakable mind
    a being of pure light
    you’ll be.
    An old beginning
    in a new design.

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thejohnmoods/

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johnmoods/?hl=en

  • Musician of the Month: Maija Sofia

    “It was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it and walk through.”

    Mary Gaitskill, Veronica

      

    I’m going to start with a secret: I haven’t written a single good song since last August. It was the night after the sudden death of one of my favourite songwriters in the world, and I had spent the whole day writing an obituary. The summer had passed me by in a long, slow unshakeable depression, I was reeling from one too many painful happenings, and my desire to stare at the ceiling alone and cry and do nothing had far-overpowered any constructive desire to write.

    Then, one hot night in August I was dog-sitting alone in an echoey, affluent house in Rathmines. The lights kept flickering off and the dogs kept barking at vague invisible things and I was on edge and jittery. To distract myself, I sat down at a plastic toy-keyboard in the kitchen and my first song in months fell fully-formed out of my hands. I played it over and over again and made a rough recording on my phone. The next day I walked around in the sun listening to the song over and over to remind myself that there is something in me, despite everything, that comes out when I least expect it, and gives me a song.

    Ever since my album came out last November, I’ve been asked to talk about songs almost constantly – how I write them, why I write them, songs that I like, songs that have been important to me – and the more I have found myself trying to talk about songs, the more I become convinced that to talk too much about songs, to unpick them too delicately, is to do them a great disservice. The whole point of making a song is to evoke the strangeness that occurs when the right words are put to the right chords and something that cannot be addressed in everyday speech is expressed. I’m talking about good songs, there are plenty of dreadful songs out there that evoke nothing but the need to immediately switch it off.

    I’m suspicious about people who talk about songwriting like it’s a day job, like it’s a tap that can be turned on at will and new words and melodies will flow out in abundance. I secretly think the people who work in this way rarely produce anything good. Maybe I’m jealous; if I sit down with the intention to write a new song, it won’t work, whatever I write will feel forced and boring and I’ll begin to convince myself I’ve lost the ability to do it. The truth I have had to accept is that if I knew how to write songs, if I knew how a song worked, I’d do it far more often. That said, there are some things that I do know.

    Firstly, I know that it is very important to not let your ‘self’ get in the way of the work. In my experience, a good song can only be written after you’ve successfully gotten yourself out of the way. You have to try and accept that you are a conduit for the work and that the work is not you, it just travels through you. This is infuriating because we live in a world that measures our human worth against our capacity to produce. I think in order to write well you have to discard any sense of your art being a reflection of you – that way you can forgive yourself for the bad work, and also not let the good work go to your head too much.

    A good song will be unshadowed by your intention or personality and will just be a mystery that reveals bit by bit itself over time, until months later will you realise – oh yes, that’s what that was about. I think I succeed to do this every ten songs or so, but it’s also important to write nine bad songs in order to really recognise a good one when it arrives.

    Secondly, I know that in order to write good songs you have to truly love songs. This is obvious, but I think I started writing songs because as long as I can remember I have loved songs more than anything.

    I recently read Mary Gaitskill’s strange and excellent novel Veronica, near the start, the pretty – dislikeable – protagonist Alison describes the want to live inside of music. To live her life as though inside of a song. She doesn’t explain quite what she means by this, but reading it, I thought, oh yes, I know. I think I’ve spent my whole life looking for ways to live inside of songs, I have an obsessive streak, an inability to ever do things gently, and when I find a new song I love I want to be folded up and made small enough to be held inside it.

    I think this kind of obsession is a bad and nauseating trait to possess in most aspects of life, but very necessary for the writing of songs. I know the difference between a good song and bad one because when I write a bad one it feels flat and rolled out and beige, but when I write a good one it feels like a full and elaborate structure, colourful and strong enough to hold me inside for days while I work the words out.

    Thirdly, when I am really stuck and feeling dreadful, I think going for a long walk, doing some physical work in the garden or having a blisteringly hot shower sometimes helps.

    Finally, I have two things I remind myself of when I’m in long phases like this one in which I haven’t written a good song in several months and it’s started to wear down my confidence in my ability. They are, firstly – that thinking your work uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism and a self-indulgence best to be avoided, and secondly, that you always think you’ll never write again, but you always, eventually, inevitably do write again.

     

    For more on Maija Sofia’s work see:

    Bandcamp: https://maijasofia.bandcamp.com/album/bath-time

    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/maijasofiamusic/

    Instagram: @maijasofiamakela

    Twitter: @maija_sofia