Defining moments

What do you personally consider to be the incisive moments in your artistic work and/or career?

I would divide it into three moments.

In the 90´s I played a lot with my friends in Argentina (Sergio Merce, Juan Cucurulo, Adrian Fanello, Hernán Vives, Gustavo Nasuti, Gerardo Velikovsky, Zelmar Garin). To play with good friends for years is fundamental, to feel music and friendship as one thing. The music that we did, was related with ideas that were not developed at all in Argentina and I still think that we were offering something good and unique for our social background.

In 2002 I established myself in Europe but only in 2004 could I start working in my music properly. Since that year I have had the chance to meet several amazing musicians and do projects with them including Keith Rowe, Axel Dörner, Burkhard Beins, Rhodri Davies, Julia Eckhardt, Toshimaru Nakamura, Robin Hayward, Mattin, Franz Hautzinger. Those projects were based in improvisation, but with a specific approach.

In the last 4 years I have worked for a long time on two records, a duo with Mika Vainio (Trahnie, released by Editions Mego) and a solo CD recently released by the label Potlatch called Zero plus Zero. This is an approach to CD production that I will keep on developing, records made carefully over a long period of time.

[Read our Mika Vainio interview]

The solo album is something that I can clearly offer as the music that is me. I worked a lot on it, and the work not only took time and thinking, but also an honest research in my taste and my vision of life and music. I'm developing my solo music as an important subject. My approach to improvisation has changed. It is not far from composition. I meet musicians and we work together, doing occasionally first time meetings.

I have collaborated with Lee Patterson, Chris Abrahams, Christian Kesten, Birgit Ulher, speakers designer Lorenzo Brusci, among others. There is a recent release with Mika Vainio, Kevin Drumm and Axel Dörner ( recorded live in 2008). I am part of a group dedicated to perform Wandelweiser composer´s music. Together with Johnny Chang and Koen Nutters.

I have met and played in a duo with Radu Malfatti several times in the last years (also as a trio with Kevin Drumm). Malfatti released in his own label, B-Boim, recordings of two of our duo live concerts. I have the highest regard for his work. I think that I met him at the exact right moment. It is an immense pleasure and a great step into de void, each time I meet and play with him.

Keith Rowe once asserted that it is often certain people that “give one permission to do things”. How was that for you – in which way did the work of  particular artists before you “allow” you to take decisions which were vital for your creative development?

Keith Rowe is certainly a liberation agent through his music and his thinking about music, who always offers very deep and moving questions.

I think that several artists that commit honestly to their work, just because of doing that, are liberating agents. But it’s up to us to get free or not, to give ourselves permission to move and be alive, is our decision. It has a lot to do with our capacity and wish to move, check and change.

I think anyway, that it is the births of my children (I have three kids 5 months, 3 and 6 years old) that has been more liberating than anything else for me. I always thought that to have a kid was going to be incredible. And it is, but I could also see the wild aspect of it. It's not only that it was, let’s say a “major chord”, happy and positive. I could feel like heavy sub lows beatings under my feet, when they arrived. Life is an energy that comes wherever and whenever it wants. That independence of anything, even of us, the parents; “that” wish to stay alive, the will of existence, is more liberating than anything else to me. Music became since then, less important in my life, and because of that, I think, much better.