Wim Mertens bursts into laughter, spontaneous and mischievous, when asked if he knows exactly the number of albums he has published to date. “My close associates talk about 70 to 75, so I guess they’re right,” he jokes. His is a case of artistic fecundity without parallel in contemporary music of the last half century, an example of Stakhanovite talent that continues to add acolytes from those seminal works (Struggle for Pleasure, Maximizing The Audience…) with which he became a reference for minimalist music during the eighties. The striking thing is that this overwhelming phonographic production, which would allow us to listen to his compositions over three consecutive days (without a break to sleep), may be much more overwhelming, as we will discover later. And that the birth of a new album—in his case, an almost routine event—continues to provoke in him an irrepressible enthusiasm more typical of a first-time author.
Mertens, a native of the small Belgian town of Neerpelt and just turned 71, is jovial and talkative on the other end of the phone while unpacking the first physical copies of Ranges of Robustness, album number 75 (or something like that) on his resume, which he will present tomorrow in concert at the Teatro Albéniz in Madrid. Nothing to do with the distant and solemn halo that surrounds other composers in the guild, from the brainy Philip Glass to the lackadaisical Michael Nyman, who took advantage of the interviews to scribble sixteenth notes on his score like someone completing a Sudoku. Mertens asks the journalist to repeat the title of his album in Spanish (“Rangos de robustez”) until he concludes that it sounds “beautiful.” He encourages “laughing as part of life”, warns that the opening song of the new album, the devilish ‘Betont’, “is a kind of dissonant Belgian joke”, and is proud of the resemblance of his first name to the english term whimsical (whimsical or extravagant, depending on the context), a kind of wink of fate. “I guess I’m a person as unpredictable as my music, which has always revolved around the ideas of fun and chaos,” she summarizes.
Where the hell does inspiration come from? Unfortunately, not even Mertens has an answer to the question that has tormented the creators of any discipline for centuries. “I just know that no systematic method works in my case,” he warns. “Many of the composers who refer to me sit down at their desk every day at eight in the morning and start working. I’m not one of those. Ideas come to me like uncontrolled sparks, as part of an intriguing process that does not depend on places or circumstances. That forces me to always be alert… and to have a piece of paper at hand or to start whistling on my iPhone.”
“My ideas are so simple that sometimes they are not understood. “I am concerned, more than music, with its ability to capture situations.”
The flashes that ended up giving shape to his new work were, as usual, “small ideas of three or four measures”, but when he analyzed them as a whole he discovered that they contained a play of contrasts: some transmitted an almost bucolic calm; others seemed like virulent shocks. Mertens ended up weaving with them a speech without words, but almost sociopolitical, about this convulsive and paradoxical world that seduces and stuns us at the same time. Hence also why he has resorted to a quasi-symphonic formation of 21 musicians, the largest in all of his work. “Among the instruments there are some quite crude electric guitars,” warns the musician, “and even distorted, in the case of ‘Polytics’, for the first time on my albums.” A sign of restlessness? “Let’s say that we are not going through a simple period in which people can feel calm. But uncertainty is, from the composer’s point of view, a very interesting ingredient.”
The creator’s commitment to symbology—for lack of words, nothing as powerful as connotations—extends to the album cover itself, a tree with a thin, arched trunk that stands alone on a sandy soil. Mertens himself discovered it “just 50 meters from the sea” in the English Channel, and for a decade he has been going without fail to photograph it throughout the four seasons. “The little tree has developed meters and meters of new roots between the dunes to survive. “It is one of the most amazing phenomena I have ever known in my entire life,” he is excited. And he emphasizes: “The roots represent my hope in human beings, just when we have to fight the most to not completely lose mental and physical stability.”
Among the most moving episodes of combative people, Mertens cites the Russian poet Marina Tsvietaeva, a woman with a fictional life and very moving work who, retaliated by Stalinism and after losing a son to starvation, would end up taking her own life in 1941, at 49. years. About it is a suite of three movements and almost eight minutes, ‘Marina’s Music’, which has matured during “15 or 20 years” after reading “dozens” of books about the writer, and which he considers “one of the most , most important” of all his production. Would you say about ‘Marina’s Music’ that it is a complex work? “Absolutely. It is deep, but at the same time accessible,” he responds. “My ideas are few and simple, so simple that sometimes people don’t understand them. My main concern is not the music itself, understood as a sound canon, but its ability to capture situations that concern me or what I know around me.”
Perhaps therein lies the secret of his prolific nature. A man capable of going to photograph a very humble tree for years is an insatiably curious person who will end up translating all those hunches into new scores. That’s why we wonder if he trusts he has the time and inspiration to achieve his 100th work. And there, the septuagenarian Mertens brings out his friendly laugh again: “I hope I don’t displease you, but I have music already recorded, still unpublished, with which to far surpass that bar of 100. This is a world first, but they will have to learn to live with me for another good season.”
Wim Mertens
Ranges of Robustness
Usury / Warner
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