Apparently, macro festivals are the main space to make a living as a musician. However, this is just one of the many circuits through which live music travels both in Spain and in the rest of Europe. Is it possible to make a living outside the big stages and funnels of the music industry? It is the million-dollar question that hundreds of groups ask themselves that perhaps do not know if there is a world beyond. It is also one of the first questions that the duo Los Sara Fontan sought answers to before going on stage for the first time in 2019.
The Sara Fontan are the Catalan drummer Edi Pou and the Galician violinist Sara Fontán. He is one half of the mathematical and primitivist rock duo Za! and through Fugazi he learned to live music through self-organization. She entered the pop circuit playing for Manos de Topo and Mishima although she comes from classical music, “where self-management and community do not exist when it comes to exposing your music.” Together they now defend a proposal that would have no place in the modern world: complex puzzles of twisted rhythms and volatile, dizzying melodies that sometimes incorporate electronic sounds but never the human voice. A year after publishing his first album, It remains pending, They have added 49 concerts.
Fontan is one of those people who “go through life questioning whether things have to be done the way they say they have to be done. And from that question a whole world emerges.” For four years the duo operated only as a live project. They were reluctant to record anything until they released their debut last fall. They also do not have social networks beyond the Telegram channel of their label Gandula. Likewise, and after their previous experiences, they decided that with this group they would take very good care of where they would play and for whom. “When you make a decision like that, you have to wake up. If you don’t want to play at that festival because you don’t want that kind of money in your life, that forces you to look for other places to play,” assumes the Galician.
Those other places exist
Those places have always existed and always will exist. Pou calculates that, of the 49 actions, a third have been outside Spain and eleven were organized by self-managed groups. In just one year, The Sara Fontan have performed in the barn of a town in Cádiz where the organizers (the Colectivo Borde Exterior) said goodbye to the evening by offering a cup of broth to the attendees and in a squat in Berlin where Sara was miraculously cured a contracture. Also, in a more than exceptional acoustic rehearsal room self-built by some kids from Nottingham. And in a forest in Huesca where the organizers of the Sonna cycle had the detail of bringing them some strawberries so they could have a snack after testing sound. And in an anarchist bookstore in Chemnitz where they felt like they were in a Tiny Desk. And at a fair in Bratislava where they memorized a slogan screen-printed on a poster: “Don’t work with cocoons. Don’t work for assholes.”
Exploring these other worlds, they discovered Intermediale, a Polish festival of experimental music where they slept in a hostel with many Ukrainian families fleeing the war. They have also dropped by a camp house in Mieres (Girona) converted into the NyamNyam artistic residence where open days are organized “that look more like a wedding or a birthday than a festival.” In October they visited Nòdul, a festival in the Xúquer valley and performed in a town of 320 inhabitants before an audience mainly made up of older people. They came from Vikendika, a traveling caravan designed by a Dutch promoter so that groups from different European countries could get to know each other by traveling together by train. “It was like going to camp! That thing that was so cool when you were little, but that you later stop doing. Why do we stop doing it? At what point does playing music become like going to the office?” Sara laments.
If all these experiences have something in common, it has been an attentive audience, people who came to listen because music was at the center of the proposal. “In our case, every day we feel that 100% of the public listens to us,” says Pou. Fontán reviews and few exceptions come to mind: the Moby Dick room in Madrid, the Monkey Weekend fair in El Puerto de Santa María and, above all, the Boga Boga festival in Donostia. Another trend they detect is that they haven’t played much in big cities. “The city is extremely aggressive and these types of friendlier and more communal spaces appear in peripheral areas,” Pou theorizes.
Detect sulfur
Part of the job of Los Sara Fontan and of any group that wants to survive in music is to learn to detect where their proposal makes sense and where it doesn’t, where they will receive friendly treatment (“something independent of the money you charge,” they clarify) and where they don’t. . It’s the first thing the duo looks for when receiving an offer. “Sometimes you notice that music is a way to achieve something else. If we are in favor of this other thing, go ahead. If music is a way to channel money or to have a big party, no.” They have just rejected an invitation because they did not see themselves “in a ham and cocktail environment.” “The public won’t enjoy it and neither will we,” they sense. The Sara Fontans have dubbed this type of suspicious offers “sulfur.”
If you have to choose the five places where you felt best, you have no doubt. They are the Isole Che Parlano festival in Sardinia, led by Sardinian instrumentalist Paolo Angeli for almost three decades, where bands, technicians and organizers dine together; the self-managed Sugar Il.legal Fest in Vic (Barcelona), which for 25 years has taken to the streets without permission to hold free concerts coinciding with a music industry fair; the Signal Reload, an electroacoustic music exhibition organized by young people also in Sardinia; the Nit de Totes that houses the Konvent.0, a cultural oasis in the old convent of an abandoned factory one hundred kilometers from Barcelona; and Bera, that town in Navarra where thirty neighbors put in ten euros each to schedule a concert a month.
Just two big festivals
For hundreds of groups, getting the attention of big festivals and performing on one of their stages is a milestone in their career. For them, the milestone is being able to reject them. “This year they called us from Primavera Sound and we said no. It can be very stupid, but I consider it a triumph to be able to say no to certain places,” Sara confesses. The Sara Fontan have only visited two major festivals this year. It’s a line they try not to cross. They only make exceptions if they think they will feel comfortable. The first was the British Womad, the festival created by Peter Gabriel to make visible the musical diversity of the planet and whose only sponsors are a green energy company and another hi-fi equipment company. They performed on the ‘Saborea El Mundo’ stage and in a family atmosphere focused on listening.
The second exception was very different. Fusion is a macro electronics festival for 70,000 people with dozens of stages programmed by as many groups, without sponsorships and in a markedly anti-fascist and anti-capitalist atmosphere. “There were dozens of bars and each one allocated their income to a different cause or group,” explains Pou. “It was like living the utopia of anarchy. There were many volunteers, all very friendly. And also, a lot of drugs. It was like entering another planet. The organization’s cars did not have license plates and were tuned like those of “Mad Max”, adds Fontan. “The police couldn’t get in there. You also didn’t see exploited workers who hate the boss, a public that has paid a lot of money and demands more… There was a very nice atmosphere of collaboration and respect as a result of seeing that it is possible to do things differently,” they conclude. The Fusion also enters the list of places that have had the most impact on them.
Flow or burn
We’ve been talking for a couple of hours. Every time another memorable night comes to mind, they do not highlight the size of the audience or how many records they sold, but rather who they had dinner with, what the house where they stayed was like, or what conversations arose. They do not even affect the level or impact of their performance. “If you’re comfortable, you play well. You flow more and improvise better because you are more connected to the moment and you are not playing the same thing all the time,” Sara summarizes. They admit to being physically tired because they turned 40 a long time ago, but they don’t feel burned out from playing so much. “You burn out when you always live in the same type of dressing room, in a hotel, at a concert… Running a show that doesn’t allow you to make changes also ends up burning you out,” says Sara.
“If I only played in concert halls, I would have quit by now,” says Pou. “In the end, the most special nights are those in which you live an experience beyond the concert, when the roles of the audience and the artist blur,” he describes. But, of course, sooner or later you have to do the math and moving through these other circuits does not mean living in ruin. “We always charge,” they clarify, although the figure can range between 300 and 2,500 euros and the high amounts always come from the institutions. “Even if I earn less money, all this fulfills you in another way,” says Fontán. For the duo, operating through these other channels is more than just an artistic decision. It is closer to the decision you make when “you choose what you consume, where you buy it or who your friends are,” they agree. “In the end, we always come back to that Orson Welles interview”recalls Pou.
The Sara Fontan close the season in December with a last trip to Bern and without the feeling of having squeezed out all the spaces outside the commercial circuit of venues and festivals. “There is a lot of music beyond Los 40 Principales and there are many ways to do concerts beyond the big festivals. These other places allow us to meet people with ideas, desires and ways of functioning that are more similar to our way of thinking,” celebrates Edi. “It is another way of getting to know the world that allows you to reconnect with the humanity of all this because those who are putting on these concerts are real people; They are not companies,” Sara highlights. “And it is a pleasure to return to many places where you have made friends. If I have a homeland, it is this musical community to which I belong,” Edi says.
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