Alvela Do not celebrate. It contains some light and dense shadows, a territory of thorns and rare certainties. It also sings to what is to come, but there is no illusions. Folklore of the experience and a trip between birth and darkness, Faia Díaz’s second album is also an experiment, which results from placing in a vanguard context traditional Galician nannies. “I am now starting to look for the words to explain it,” he assures eldiario.es. One of them is whatever happens, limit: through several borders travel Alvelaa self -edited work that presents live on April 23 in Santiago de Compostela and that explores the least friendly corners of motherhood.
“It is difficult to see the limit between personal experience and what is socialized,” he says. In Alvela Nothing is evident and, at the same time, everything is explicit. “I think that difference is subtle in the album,” he adds. An event as intimate as being a mother treated through traditional music: ten ropes or cantigas of Berce, romances or other couplets make up the work. “It crosses its loudness, the search for songs,” he understands. The pieces rescued them in the archives of Dorothé Schubarth and Antón Santamarina, in the recordings that the American Alan Lomax made in Galicia in the 50s, in the family devon -sus parents they were part of Fuxan Os Ventos, legendary group Folk Antifranchist- and in the repertoire of Erminda Miramontes. “Vou Mollar os Pés Nas Fonte / Ver Iuaga will go out,” he sings in You wantin which a Viola drone builds a tense, restless environment. “The subtext of the album has to do with my experience. In some interviews I talked about obstetric violence, but I am still looking for a way to say. It costs me,” he says.
This contrast of autobiographical materials with the collective dimension of popular song is, perhaps, one of the nuclei of Alvela. After all, tradition tends to objectify human experience and, in some way, subsume subjectivity. Or not. “Oral transmission, those melodies, those letters, allow to express the personal,” says Faia Díaz, “have always allowed it. All women who have sung them over time talked about their own penalties.” “That vén or cocón / sleep or neno / that non dorme non”, di Coconon one figure at the same time metaphysics and earthly that threatens the nights of the children who threaten the nights of the mothers. The treatment to which Díaz submits her, her voice in a minor tone bending itself almost until she evokes a barking and a minimal and repetitive guitar that appropriates the plane, serves as a summary of the sound intentions of the album.
“We seek the depths of the human being. The selected melodies gave rise to it, with their certain melancholic character,” he says. The first plural person refers to her and Hevi, restless and brilliant producer of the album, the man behind the electromutant rap of Malandromeda. Two distant appearance universes collided in the previous and first album by Faia Díaz, Cape Leirín (2018), and obtained one of the most radical and autonomous pieces of what is called Folk Gallego, a documentary voice record in a situation. Alvela He shares some of his constants, although he makes them evolve. “I felt that Cape Leirín It was a place of exploration that still had its way, “he says,” we thought a lot about how to pull that thread without becoming Cape Leirín 2”It is not.
Emotional Anthropology
Alvela He resorts, like his predecessor, to field recordings. This time, however, its use differs. “We wanted to manipulate them, we sample them, we adapt them to the time we were already living what we wanted to tell,” he explains. The Cancero of the Morena Vaca, who was the pet of his neighboring sacristan, sounds in Mixurrina He detected, by chance, in a video hung on YouTube that the countryman appeared with his grandparents and in the background the animal could be heard. Or birds that share prominence with Díaz’s voice in I wrote. Or the breathing of your own daughter in Maruxiña. His sister and mother sing in some sections. “We work with file sounds and our own records,” he says, “there is a kind of family, emotional anthropology.” Sounds found, field recordings, loved ones, rope instruments, with those wicker weaves Faia Díaz the basket of Alvela.
To the dark tone of the album, which break Touton at the beginning of the second face and in the end Sing Rola -E. of José Afonso-, was accompanied by Hevi. “I think it is something that has not been done much here, as far as I know, and when a work also looks for things that you have never heard. Or at least it is something that interests me,” he answers the question of the reasons, “Hevi and I have that place.” Perhaps the Galician root music has not worked this in this way, but the connections with some of the most original developments of European folk traditions exist: the Irish Lankum, Sirôm Selovenos. And, at another level, one of the references that Faia Díaz faced the study, the only one of Desethore (1970) and its hieratic vocal interpretation, Avantgarde. The repetition, the minor tone, the whisper, the deconstruction. Music against the heritage idea of music: an inquiry, not a treasure. Torch Songs For newborns. And that is not, despite everything, a depressive disk. “On the contrary. It is not celebratory, it is rather a complaint, but we tried a chiaroscuro that reflected the experience of life, where not everything is down and above,” he says, “I tried to sing from a place of calm. There they took me the melodies and there I placed thanks to my own memory linked to the experience of childbirth. They were more sensitive, less luminous moments.”
Music and its collective dimension
In addition to his days philosophizing, taking wines and talking about life with the producer, Hevi, another key person in the conceptualization of Alvela It was the poet Antía Otero –Baroque (Apiario, 2022) is his latest book. She helped him choose and adapt the texts, and provided access to a fundamental document for the configuration of the album, the conference that García Lorca taught in 1928 about children’s nannies. “In the melody, as in the sweet, the emotion of history takes refuge, its permanent light without dates or facts,” wrote the poet, “the melody, much more than the text, defines the geographical characters and the historical line of a region and acutely points out defined moments of a profile that time has erased.” The Musical part, already in the musical part, the harpist Bleuenle Fiec, the violinist Antía Ameixeiras -of Caamaño & Ameixeiras -, guitarist Antía Muíño, is usually quartet or cows.
Of cows is precisely another of the projects in which Díaz participates. What it produces is almost opposite to its solo elepés, a kind of ironic pop folk, versions of great hits of the radio translated into Galician and arranged with fun vocal games. Nor does the FAIA alone coincide with his trio next to the Lar Legido drums and the keyboardist Nacho Igmig, who is dedicated to rebuilding the unfathomable songbook of the Portuguese José Afonso. What elements do this eclecticism share? “The political commitment, with feminism, with the defense of the Galician language. For me art, in general, it is a political issue. I understand the song and the scene from that place,” he replies, “later, each project gives an account of the realities that one has within itself. We feel pain, sadness, guilt, whatever, and we can also laugh and dance and be superficial. Everything together lives.”
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