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that has to do with cultural things, and geographical, social and also economic things. I’m trying to document all of these, but at the same time I know that my work has these two functionalities: on one side, I’m recording these oral traditions in order to have them on video, and on the other side I know that my work is con- cerned with people, and somehow I’m changing people, in that people start to remember things after I’ve gone to meet them. Because I’m going there, I record them, and put it on the internet, and somewhere some family in Canada, or in France or whatever, see the video and then call the woman and say ‘Wow, you’re a very beautiful person!’, and the woman calls me and says ‘Come again, because now I remember other stuff’. And that is really strong.”
Also you’re validating for them something which they’d per- haps considered was of no value.
“Yes. And also the other thing I’m really concerned with is to put everything on the same level. Because for me there are no hierarchies in music. All the music is important; a pop star who’s in the newspapers all the time has the same importance as the woman who is singing for herself when she’s washing the dishes.”
e spent his long childhood holidays with his grand- mother, in a small village. “I was used to being with old people and I really like them, and the way they see the universe; it’s completely different from the way young people see it. They have a lot of knowl- edge that they need to transmit. I respect that. So I’m always try- ing to find these people, because I don’t think they get the atten- tion they deserve.”
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“I’m always saying, ‘I don’t record traditional music; what I do is record real people in real places, and I respect what they want to give me.’ Sometimes they’ll come to me and say, ‘This song is from Abba’, and they play this Abba song on violin or whatever. And I respect that. Tradition is always contemporary. It has to fol- low the times. The old people that I record are seeing soap operas in their houses. So of course they mix the songs, the melodies from soap operas, with a romance that they know from their mother or grandmother. So everything is a mix. I have that space, that frame, with the landscape, and then I put people there and say, ‘Now you can give me everything you want’. And I want the access to these recordings to be democratic. The academic ethno- musicologists in Portugal don’t know how to react to that, but I don’t give a shit any more.”
Tiago uploads the videos to the Net, often on the same day as the filming. The full, daily-growing set – 3,277 as I write this, having gone up by three just today – is on the high-quality Vimeo: see the link at the end of this article. The project isn’t externally funded; he finances it from what he earns from other work he does, and his assistants, named on the website, are volunteers, so they too are drawn into the project and its subjects. I asked him, as I asked Vasco, whether anyone he videos ever gets embarrassed about how they look or sound or whatever, and says “No, no-one must ever see that!” or asks for payment.
“No, never. Because it’s an exchange; I’m recording and I’m giving them the respect. When they see themselves they feel respected. They ask me, ‘Where will you show this, where will you take me?’ And I say, ‘To the world!’ And in seven years it’s changed a bit the way people in Portugal see their own roots. And that is really important.”
While no longer a member of Omiri, he likes what Vasco is
doing. “He’s a really good musician, he knows really how to con- trol things in the show. It started just with my videos, and now he also doing his own, recording other people in order to fill the gaps. He’s an amazing guy, warping the videos and so on, he’s real- ly good at doing that. And I really like that my videos can have another approach and can be in another universe.”
Special thanks to Celina da Piedade.
www.omiri.eu amusicaportuguesaagostardelapropria.org
A Música Portuguesa A Gostar Dela Própria’s videos:
vimeo.com/mpagdp
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