Suso Saiz: “Whoever sees one of my concerts knows that they have seen something that will never happen again”.
Suso Saiz, the great Spanish composer of ambient music, a genre in which he is considered one of its truly international figures, performs this Saturday at 20:30 in the cloister of the Cuenca monastery of Uclés, in a programme entitled Lux, which “illuminates” Holy Week with electronic meditative music.
Trained as a guitarist at the Real Conservatorio Superior Música de Madrid, Suso Saiz was also a composition student of Luis de Pablo, with whom he began his development as an electro-acoustic musician before founding the experimental music group Orquesta de las Nubes with percussionist Pedro Estevan and soprano María Villa. In the mid-eighties he began his solo career as composer and guitarist, while he began to work as an arranger, musician and producer for artists such as Esclarecidos, Los Piratas, Luis Eduardo Aute, Duncan Dhu, Luz Casal and Los Planetas, among many others. He is also the author of soundtracks for films – El detective y la muerte, by Gonzalo Suárez, and El milagro de P. Tinto, by Javier Fesser, among others – and television programmes – such as Al filo de lo imposible on TVE.
Resonant Bodies, released by the Dutch label Music From Memory, is his latest album so far… but it is not what he will be playing in Uclés, as he explains in this interview on Tuesday 4 April.
This Saturday you will be performing in Uclés.
Yes, in the monastery of Uclés.
And before turning on the recorder you said that it’s promising…
I think so. I’ve never been there, but from what I’ve been told and from the photos I’ve seen, it must be a mass in the middle of nowhere.
They call it “El Escorial of La Mancha”.
It must have buildings from many different periods. There is a monastery there and obviously it has a church, which must be the first thing that was built, which must be Renaissance or Baroque, and there is a seminary, which must be more recent, late Baroque, 18th century. On the other hand, the Festival restricts the use of electric light because it tries to go back to ancient times. Within the festival there is an exhibition, with pieces on loan from Cuenca Cathedral, for example, and the pieces are not lit with bulbs or spotlights, but with candles; theoretically with the light with which they would have been seen in their time.
You are announced together with Ana Roxanne. Do you perform together?
No. She is an American artist who is also playing on the same day, but we don’t play together. The concert I think will be in the cloister, which is really like a corridor; a gigantic corridor, because the cloister is big, but a corridor. I’m looking forward to seeing the sonority, which I imagine will be peculiar. I trust that it will allow me to reach a point that is sufficiently attractive for listeners to be able to walk towards that “deep thought” which is what I seek with my music: to generate a sound space that helps reflection, without anything to do with mystical aspects. I believe that reflection is something we all need. We all need to look inside ourselves and observe ourselves carefully, something that, because of the kind of life we normally lead, we don’t do.
The way you put it, it’s not going to be a concert in which you play such and such a piece from your records…
My concerts are never like that. For some time now I’ve been starting from sound material that usually comes from the last thing I’ve recorded, which in this case is Resonant Bodies, but I always recreate it. I always try to relate to the space in which I play and generate things from there. Maybe it sounds a bit pretentious, but it’s true: my concerts are unique. All of them. Whoever sees one of my concerts knows that they have seen something that will never happen again. I always say that I am a musician “by ear”: I react to what I hear and I try to transform the sonic reality of the moment. Silence is banned in my music. I have a total incontinence of sound, but I try not to let my concerts last more than an hour, because I consider that any longer than that is a mistreatment of the audience, because there is a level of concentration that cannot be maintained for much longer. And I try to get as many people as possible who participate in my concerts to enter into that level of concentration, and for that there is a time to introduce that point of depth and another time to leave. Otherwise, everyone could end up asleep. A good friend of mine told me after a concert that he had loved it, but that he had to excuse him, because he had been asleep. Well, I love that. I asked him: “Was it pleasant for you?” and he replied: “What a wonderful dream I had”. Well, I am happy. That may be one of the aims of my music. I consider the listener, the spectator, a co-author with me, because each one lives that reality in a different way and that experience is theirs.
From the stage, are you really able to perceive a general atmosphere from the audience?
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. There is one thing that is deep silence, in which the attention is “heard”. It is heard, because when there is no attention, it is heard. You can hear it, because when there is no attention, there are little noises, coughs, chair movements, etc. and everything can be heard. There may be silence, but there is no attention. It’s just restless people saying: “Wow, is this going to last long? I didn’t know it was going this way, and this is a bore”. All this is thought and you hear it because it sounds. But when you are totally inside there is a deep silence and when you notice that, you say: “oolé! It’s gone in”. Silence only happens when the concert is over. I tend to end concerts in silence: I don’t end with a climax. My music goes towards silence and when the silence is maintained, when seconds or minutes pass, with the audience in total silence, and I’ve finished the concert, that’s total success. That’s when I say, “Holy shit”. That’s my biggest applause, that’s what moves me. Silence is gratitude to the musician. Applause is not. Applause is frivolity. And when silence is clearly perceived. That silence is very, very powerful.
Concerts being like that, what are albums for you?
Albums are a sum of experiments, the credentials of my evolution. It’s like telling where I’m walking. In each album I usually change, apart from the fact that there is, in inverted commas, a theme that has moved me. But I don’t believe in the representativeness of music: I believe that music is a totally abstract art, that it doesn’t tell anything, ever. Nothing. That belongs to the listener, not to the creator.
Not even Messiaen?
Not Messiaen, not anybody. I’m a fan of Messiaen. He’s one of the musicians I’ve listened to the most in my life. But when I listen to him I don’t see what he writes. I see other things. That’s why I say that I always consider experimental or theoretical work in my records, especially lately. I always define some acoustic or experimental strategy in them and they are developed during a period in which I am working, researching – it’s a way of speaking – on a specific subject. Now I’m already working on the material for the new album and it’s going to revolve around distortions, which is going to be the fundamental element of the new work. Distortion in all its aspects, in all its functions, in all its ranges; and through all kinds of materials and sound objects. Well, the whole process of study and experimentation that I’m doing, that’s what makes up my records. Afterwards, the record, let’s say, leaves me and I find my own way to see what I can do with everything I learned, with what I experimented with during that period.
We have also seen on your Instagram account that you are going to perform in the United States. How did that proposal come about?
There are some promoters who until now were called Ambient Church and now Reflections, who organise events in which they bring together visual artists, who do mapping on all the walls of the church, and people from the more meditative, more restful ambient, the ambient of the drone. The more static ambient. With that programme, which is always held in churches, they try to generate deep spiritual moments and they are the most powerful ambient events in the United States and, possibly, in the world because they are held in big churches, where a thousand people can enter.
Los Angeles, Chicago and New York… You start on 22 April and finish on 6 May. Your first performances in the United States?
The first since… I think it was 1993 or 1994. In New York it was going to be in a church called Church of the Heavenly Rest, which is on Fifth Avenue, but they’ve changed it. Now it’s going to be in Brooklyn, in a church called St. Ann & the Holy Trinity. Anyway, they’re big, beautiful churches, almost all Protestant. In Los Angeles I’ll be playing at the Presbyterian Church in Pasadena, a space for three thousand people.
At some point did you consider or did you have the opportunity to have gone to live in the United States and develop your career there?
I don’t know, because I never really tried, but there was a moment, with an album of mine called Símbolos (DRO, 1991), when I made a very good entrance into the American alternative scene. They called me “The Andalusian Voodoo Child”, that was my nickname. It’s an anecdote, but I’ve never really thought about it. Only sometimes, in low moments, when you say: “fuck, what a shit!”, when the years go by and you see that you can’t do what I always wanted to do. As much as I’ve enjoyed producing records, that wasn’t my desired occupation. At one of those low moments I did think about it; but you also quickly think that you have a family and that you have to move your family and that requires a heavy investment, because you’re not going to move to live under a bridge…
How did Music From Memory, the Dutch company that publishes your new records and has reissued several of your old ones, come about?
It was them, who insisted for a long time. They were interested in reissuing some of my old stuff and I was totally passive, because I’m not really interested in the past, if at all. I spent a couple of years telling them that I wasn’t interested in anyone publishing my old records but, in the end, Miki [his wife and manager] convinced me: “These guys are really nice, they’re super fans, they have a very healthy interest in your music! Let them publish it, what do you care?” And, in the end, she convinced me. And it was because of that, really, that I decided to take up the story again and make the effort to get going again to play. I spent two years working my ass off, ten hours a day, to get my act together, because I was totally out of it, out of everything…
Were you “rusty” to that extent?
I was never a race car; it was always a part-time job. That’s the first time I tried to put my “machine” at full throttle. You may or may not like a concert of mine, but the execution has to be perfect. I can’t fail. It can’t happen that one day I do a decent concert and the next day it’s a complete disaster. I can’t allow that. If someone says I’m “a legend”, they’re right, there’s a reason for that. So, then, I work my ass off, because it doesn’t come out by itself. I try to make my performance as perfect as possible, and I try to make sure that the sound and everything is perfectly matched. I polish and polish every concert. I work every day of my life. Every day I do a live improvisation session, which I record almost every day, although most of it is deleted afterwards. That discipline is fundamental to maintain the level I think I have to meet.
Do you personally take care of the sound of the space or do you always go with the same technician?
No, no, no, no, no. I always take care of this type of sound myself. I always take care of these kinds of things myself. And I always say that it’s the musician’s fault if a concert sounds bad. Always. The engineer is a medium. If the engineer is the one who has to make it sound good, it’s bad. The one who has to make it sound good is the one who is doing it, the generator. You have to have that ability to transform yourself to optimise the place. From the perspective of always doing the same gig, which is the pop perspective or the standard perspective, you do need an engineer, so that it’s always the same. But I don’t need my concerts to be the same: I need them to sound good.
So, for this concert in Uclés, how is the process going to be until you give the go-ahead and go out to perform?
I usually go as calmly as possible and with as much time as possible. In this case I think I’ll be there before two o’clock in the afternoon. I need time and relaxation. After that, maybe in ten minutes it will be sorted out, because just because I need time and relaxation doesn’t mean I need a lot of time, but just in case…
How do you listen to yourself from the audience’s listening point if you’re on stage?
It’s texture and texture moves. When you notice the feedbacks you know how it’s sounding; you don’t need to have a frontal listening. But, apart from that, I leave loops playing and go outside.
I don’t know if you liked the term “new age music” at the time…
I didn’t like it and I didn’t dislike it. I’ve never considered myself a “new age” artist…
Actually, I’m on to something else: we don’t talk about new age now, but we are full of new age music…
Yeah, right! Most of what they call ambient or melodic ambient is new age. There is very little experimental music in the world. Almost all the experimental electronic music that is made is indebted to pop or rock songs. Pop and rock are alive in almost all current electronic music and in what they call “experimental”. Pure experimentalists, who break away from standard structures and clichés, there are very few.