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Part 2

It has often been mentioned that "the future of music is in live". What's your perspective on this? What kind of unique experiences does a concert experience continue to offer to this day? 

As I already mentioned: a ritual where both audience and artists participate at the same time. In this regard, gigantic concerts don’t work. In my experience, there’s a limit in how big a place can be for things to work properly. Small or Medium sized spaces are the best in this sense. Any musicians can agree with that. I remember some performances where the audience’s concentration and listening were so deep that you were totally driven into the practice of playing. I can describe the act of participated listening as some sort of amplifier of the performer's focus; a collective amplification of artist’s focus. These are phenomena beyond time and are as unique today as they were hundreds, thousands of years ago.

Can festivals or concert spaces survive just by presenting music these days? What's your take on extra-musical concepts like presentations, discussions, art exhibitions and the like as an enrichment of your musical program? 

When we go in certain places (I think about some old libraries or private homes) we can perceive somehow what passed by these walls. Theatres or clubs are like churches. They gather people together for a specific purpose; they have a function and this function is much better achieved if focalized, isolated. In other words, I think a place should enhance what it has built for. Your home reflects your identity and, when we invite friends in, they breathe and participate in our time, our story. That’s the best it can happen when we walk through some old theatre’s doors. We can literally breathe the thousands of plays and concerts that took life inside these walls, and we are close to all the people who gathered there. With them in there we share a specific attitude.
I know it sounds naïve or romantic. It's not. Give a place a multipurpose character and it will give you back a multipurpose response. It will be 'just ok' for almost everything; not bad; not great for anything in particular. Malls are multipurpose places. Theatre and concerts halls are not. If we really wanted to build concert halls economically sustainable, we should start to build them smaller, maybe. 

How do you see the relationship between music and the location it's performed at? What are special characteristics of your concert space, would you say? 

It’s clear to me that yes, music and the location where it’s performed in are linked. We can simply think where a certain kind of music is created; African-Caribbean tribal music asks for space and hearing it in a European theatre is like watching a tiger in a cage; I can admire its beautiful skin and even look into her eyes, but it will never be the same as experiencing the animal in its natural habitat. Music is a living entity and, like food, we should learn how to manipulate with respect. As colonizers we are not used to that; as human being we are. Electronic music is at his best in indoor flats, warehouse parties or small club; theatres are made for plays and rarely accomplish a good service to music; a different discourse is related to opera houses of course. I would distinguish acoustic based music and electric/ electronic music since each of these rely on such different relationships between the human body and sound, gestural approaches etc. As we know, instruments shape the music they are built to produce but, as we inherited the tradition of ancestral musical tools, we also rewrote and updated these traditions, so that we are always changing the function of the elements in the circle music-musicians-instruments. In this sense, I see a lot of confusion today on around what to play and it seems that we lost what we knew, but did not achieve any better. A performance is created by musicians, venue and audience, together.

How would you define what differentiates a successful live performance from a poor one? What can artists do from your point of view to improve their live act?

I would say the ideal situation occurs when performers are committed to their material, confident enough in themselves to ignore any technical imperfections, and deliver genuinely what they love to do. But, as I already mentioned, the audience plays a massive role in conditioning performers, for the best and the worst, supporting and participating in the event (or the opposite). Sometimes both these positive conditions happen and the massive effort put into a show, including the time and money invested by fans, is paid back. As I also said before, architecture and venues condition play a big part in this marriage. For this reason analysis of the space before the performance is vital in order to avoid bad surprises. I've been at concerts where security barriers or a stage too high or far away separated musicians and audience in such a way that it was almost impossible to engage yourself with people out there. If such conditions occur, artists should be strong enough to refuse to perform or be able to adjust the settings for the best. Lights often help to solve ugly conditions! In short, I usually try to make the most of the stage I have, involving directors or stage designers if possible or just asking other people’s opinions about the setting where I’m about to perform. The space I have should serve the audience and not my ego.

Live performances are often considered as one-way forms of communication. In which way, however, can an audience actively contribute to them as well?

They are not. The audience, unless architectural or spacial or technical conditions interfere, has a tremendous impact on performances. Artists are conditioned by their audience and, at the same time, influence it. If this relationship is as healthy as it should be, the concert produces mutual enhancement. If not, and only one side of the table is happy, then the concert is to be considered unsuccessful, in my opinion. And it happens more often than one can think.
As I said before, an audience can be helped to contribute to a show only if producers and promoters literally love what they are doing and are truly pursuing a two-way communication (providing the best conditions for both parts). If you treat the audience as a mass of ticket payers, you'll not have them really engaged, no matter how much expensive the entertainment machine is.

The role of the arts is always subject to change. What's your view on the (e.g. political/social/creative) tasks of the arts today and how do you try to meet these goals in your own work?

I don't know if the role of the arts is ever changed. I think the opposite. Probably what has changed with the times is how power tries to use the arts for pursuing its goals.
Since today’s society is still ruled by high forms of control the role of the arts is highly observed and more and more subject to different forms of interference. Money is the most powerful of these I think. The role of power, the market, and the arts in the contemporary scenario is a subject of extraordinary interest to study. We all are involved on an everyday basis. 

Music-sharing sites and blogs as well as a flood of releases and more and more live performances in general are presenting both listeners and artists with challenging questions. What's your view on the value of music today? 

I know very few people who actually are developing a self-conscious evolution as a listener. The majority of them are not musicians. Think about that. I see music today having become like some sort of personal way of self-expression more than a truly deep science on its own. This not necessarily bad (Fluxus movements imagined art as integrated into the everyday life, after all), but seems to me that the incredibly high accessibility to any possible information, mixed with a mass mediatic (including the web) 'fast food-like' approach to culture are producing a large number of 'fast food-like' producers/consumers of music as natural consequence.
Music mirrors society, as it always did. There are an incredible amount of positive effects of such massive divulgations, but also a terrible, unfortunate backside such as the increasing of superficiality; in the urbanised life there's less time for reading, less time for dedicated listening etc. But details are everything in music, so what can we do? If the market gives artists the luxury of becoming full-time professionals, also it asks them to produce more and more to achieve the economic balance. Academic and public aids are meant to fill the gap and sustain quality music just because of the impossibility of its existence without them. To me, the old time approach to writing and composing coexists with some glimpse of modern fast surfing. The former is time-consuming but secures relatively high controls on the matter, the latter the opposite, and this new way of producing and composing is exactly how we transform our time through art! But still, I prefer to choose if I want to do sport or having a long walk, don’t you?


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