f70 Omiri On The Wall
Portugal’s Vasco Ribeiro Casais, aka Omiri, is doing innovative things performing to videos of traditional field recordings made by Tiago Pereira. Andrew Cronshaw has seen the future!
P
rojections at gigs often come across as bad TV, a rectangle of jerky flickering repetitiveness, distracting from rather than enhancing the music or the
focus on the physically present perform- ers. But Omiri is different.
Omiri is Vasco Ribeiro Casais, interact- ing live, on nyckelharpa, Portuguese bag- pipes, bouzouki, cavaquinho and viola braguesa, with his cut-ups of field video recordings of singers and instrumentalists made across Portugal by Tiago Pereira and now increasingly by Vasco himself.
There are Omiri live videos online – find them via the Omiri website, linked at the end of this feature – and two CDs, Dentro Da Matriz (Ferradura, 2010) and Baile Electrónico (Bigorna, 2017), and they’ll give you the gist. But it wasn’t until I saw the show live, in the lovely Alentejo city of Évora, that I got the full impact.
Late-night, after a free concert by Galandum Galundaina with guests Kepa Junkera, Celina da Piedade and Tó Zé that was held in in Évora’s main square to cele- brate the anniversary of Portugal’s April 25th 1974 ‘Carnation Revolution’, the audi- ence decamped a few streets away to where Omiri was set up. The projection was not on a screen but on a courtyard wall where the images overlaid the wall’s windows and tex- ture in a pleasingly surreal way.
Vasco, swapping rapidly and smoothly between instruments mid-number, con- trolled the rhythms, video and audio clips from field video recordings, via foot ped- als and computer, to make powerful dance music with its roots and images firmly in the traditional dance musics and songs of Portugal. The video faces and voices of the singers and instrumentalists, from the very aged to children, including the drummers whose sound powered the beats, became
the stars, and the packed audience sang along to the melodic hooks.
Vasco and I settled down for a proper chat a few days later in a café in Setúbal.
Omiri began when? “About 2007 I think. I was doing a lot of stuff [he was, among other things, a member of Dazkarieh and, with Celina da Piedade and others, in the influential folk-dance band Uxu Kalhus], and as a side project I was playing some gigs with Tiago VJ-ing with videos of dancing – not folk stuff, contemporary dance, Charlie Chaplin, that sort of thing. And then he started A Músi- ca Portuguesa A Gostar Dela Própria, recording the old ladies and Portuguese tradition and gave me the raw material from the videos, and I made a video remix. We went crazy about it, and people were giving it a lot of feedback. We changed all the videos we’d been using in the show to his recordings, and started making new songs. Tiago didn’t have enough time to do it alongside A Música Portuguesa A Gostar and his other projects though, and in 2013 he left the band.”
Being the one visible on stage, and also making the remixes, Vasco realised he could carry on solo, with a sound engineer. “It occurred to me that perhaps I have something that represents Portugal, besides fado, and for the new generation.”
“I really like Tiago; he films very well,
and he’s very generous to me, he’s given me lots of material. But I think it’s good if I have my own material, different from his, because he uses it for lots of different pro- jects, and I want to have exclusive material. I already made a song — the last single I released — where all the recordings I did myself. And now I’m starting to collect around Portugal.” (The video material he uses, Tiago’s and his own, comes from across Portugal and the islands). “And there’s another aspect, that you go there and speak to the people, and spend some time with them, and they understand what you and they are doing in a different way.”
With both Vasco and Tiago I raised the subject of how the people in the videos feel about them, and what they get out of it. For example, an old lady with missing
Photo: Andrew Cronshaw
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