How do you find music as a form of expression? How does that happen?
It was quite accidental. I did not have parents or uncles, or any other family members, who were musicians. I did study music when I was very young but I really didn’t enjoy it.
It was when I was already an adult and I was doing some other things that I began to play around with music, and that was when I discovered this form of self-expression. Music was something I was experimenting with and it was mixed up with some other things I was doing. In the beginning I was making videos and then later on it was poetry.
I think I came to music in a very playful way, with absolutely no intentions of it becoming a job or a profitable activity. So there is no clear beginning, certainly not a serious beginning, I would say.
But do you have any musical skills. Did you learn to play any instruments?
As I said, I was in piano school, in Spanish it is called The Conservatorio, when I was a child and I hated it. I began lessons when I was seven and I stopped when I was nine or ten years old. So I didn’t last very long. I did show some promise, and I did have some talent according to some people, but I was very little and I just didn’t enjoy the experience.
That seems very unfortunate?
What that experience did was to make me be really against serious music training for children. I believe learning music should be kept as a game as much as possible and no child under 13 should ever be exposed to that kind of serious training and the pressure which accompanies it. I’m quite militant about that view.
You did learn some basic music skills?
I obviously have a very basic approach to piano and later on I learned bass, guitar and the charango, but for me it’s all a heterodox approach to instruments and a very punk rock way of playing.
How do you then discover electronic music?
Well, I guess, for me electronic music is the only way for someone coming to music a little bit older to learn how to create their own work, and what was useful for me was that it was easy to experiment. To me it was the best tool for just experimenting, learning as you go along. Electronic music is a medium for creating music. You really can create any kind of music with electronics.
When I started, I was playing with Cumbia, which is a Latin American style of music, and I was looking at what could I do with that style of music through my computer which was a trend at that time. I was not the only one trying to do that.
What is Cumbia?
Cumbia is a very percussive type of music which normally has at least two or three percussionists in a group and then two or three harmonic elements. If you want to experiment with this type of music and you don’t have six session musicians, you find that electronic music is perfect. You can just try it. You can create, you can compose, and then literally you can assemble all the parts together yourself.
From what I have listened to there’s quite a lot of unique rhythmic patterns and you use polyrhythms in your music?
It took me a while to develop an understanding of what I was doing and it obviously involved a lot of training in sound because, for instance, many of our traditional instruments, we didn’t really have an established way of recording them. Modern music, and especially electronic music, is based on Western European music transformed into beats and various music samples.
It doesn’t work the same for traditional music. That’s a very different musical situation and so in order to include many of the instruments, the sounds and the rhythms, into my work, I needed to invent a way to do it. And as I said, I was not the only one trying to do that and people are still trying to work out how the complex rhythms of traditional music can be recreated electronically.
And the polyrhythms?
In terms of polyrhythms, I had to work out how to marry the rhythms of traditional music, in systems which were developed to work in 4:4 time, and to be very rhythmically monotonous, so to speak, or at least they have really, really strong parameters which are extremely difficult to break free from.
You end up asking yourself questions like, how do you do you make music in 6-8 time for instance, or with more traditional Latin American music, which might not have a strict time signature and is based much more on a method of playing which is based on a feel for this type of music, rather than a strict rhythmical process how do we recreate that using electronic and digital tools.
I would suggest that a lot of what we have to do is experiment, be playful, and that goes back to my attitude towards music generally.
To see more of the work of Ignacio Rosa
