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teeth and a sticking plaster on her face. “I was in Ribatejo, and the guy that hired me asked, ‘Can you do a song with the videos I have from this lady?’, and he gave me the video of her singing that song. She was 85 years old. And when I played the song in the show, although it was very late and it was cold she was on the front row and she was happy.”
Do they ever expect to be paid? “They
aren’t professional musicians, and they’re happy to be a part, to keep their memory alive. And I have people saying, ‘Hey, that’s my grandmother! Thank you!’ I’m plan- ning to do a show where I’ll invite a couple of the people in the videos to appear live, and there’ll be a fee and somewhere nice for them to stay.”
V
asco himself, and other Por- tuguese musicians, often take part in one another’s events where there’s no money avail- able. There’s great music hap- pening in Portugal at the moment, indeed something of a golden age, despite, or perhaps because of, the recession in which the country has suffered particularly badly. “When the recession started the music got much better, lots of people doing stuff. Like a bubble.”
This upsurge is apparent throughout the Portuguese music scene, and, although Vasco feels folk music is marginalised and less celebrated than it should be, it feeds a human craving for community and shared activity. It seems to me that in Portugal there are signs of the sort of enthusiastic
rediscovery by the young of the music of their grandparents that I also see in, for example, neighbouring Galicia, and in Poland with mazurek dancing and playing, and as earlier in Hungary with dance-house.
“We had the fascist regime, and peo- ple were very poor and they used to sing as they worked, and do the dances. It was a completely different context. But now they carry on doing it out of context; they like singing the songs, they like to dance. If you go to a concert, you’re mainly on your own, watching and listening. But on the folk scene, not just in Portugal but across borders, we meet, we play and dance with one other, we’re all like family.”
Though Omiri is just Vasco, he keeps the band name. “I don’t like to use my own name for it, because I like doing many other sorts of things, so if it were my name people would be expecting a particular something. I do this, and I have Seiva which is very different.” Seiva, with his partner, singer Joana Negrão who was also in Dazkarieh, is their acoustic trio playing traditional Portuguese music with tradi- tional instruments. “And I like lots of hard- core and metal, and I’m preparing – if I have time – some stuff with a pop guy.”
He talks about how he develops a number.
“All the songs are dances. The starting point is normally a Portuguese folk-dance form, such as a vira or a repasseado, mal- hão, corridinho or fado batido. And those are like the limits, a certain kind of
groove, a certain kind of phrase that I want to respect. And then in the bass I’ll try to make it sound, um… sometimes I will listen to Skrillex, and say, ‘OK, let’s make a vira like Skrillex’, with a riff, like a dub-step riff, on top of it. I want to have that vira kind of mood, and I want to keep eight bars in a phrase. I’ll pick a sample of an old lady singing, and then try to fit it. If it doesn’t fit I have to shorten it. And also I want to make it commercial, and for that you usually need a groove whose stress is on 2 and 4, but I’m doing triple-time dum- takata, so the result is beats that don’t sound like what everybody else is doing. And in the end I don’t play dub-step time, so it doesn’t sound like Skrillex, and it’s not a traditional vira, but you can dance a vira to it. It’s a challenge; it’s taken me quite a long time to work it out.”
The rhythm sounds come partly from the videos, augmented where necessary. “I have the beats that come from the videos, and some extra drums, and the rest I’m playing live. I record a phrase on, say, the bouzouki, then I add in nyckel- harpa, or cavaquinho, gaita or braguesa.” He live-loops, but rather than the build- up and repetitiveness of the music of many who use loopers he has developed a way of using very short loops that he can drop in and out, so it’s not obvious he’s looping. “I record each bar individu- ally, and I programme the software so it can put the chords in different positions, and I can create different harmonies from the same loops.”
Photo: Andrew Cronshaw
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