Welcome to another part of SONICA art talk series, where we are today talking with Clara de Asís, who is a Spanish composer and performer based in France. She’s developing an approach to sound that highlights its simplicity, non-intervention and active listening as a means of music-making. Her work displays extreme precision and intuitive openness that involve dedicated attention to sound, on its details and in its most pure form. Besides actively releasing albums on labels such as Marginal Frequency, Another Timbre, Elsewhere and Pilgrim Talk. She’s this year's SHAPE artist. And she's participating in SONICA 2020 addition at Cankarjev dom and at Equrna Gallery where the exhibition part of SONICA is happening.

Clara, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.

Thank you.

And I hope you've been enjoying your stay in Ljubljana and the work that you will present soon. But for the people that might not know you, could you tell us a bit about your musical background? How did you start moving from a more traditional guitar-playing to improvisational output?

I think I've always been attracted to sound. So, it goes like as far back as I can remember, actually I’ve always been listening and been attached to sounds. I started playing the guitar when I was about 12 and I was at the time in Spain, in southern Spain. So, the music that I was taught at this time in this place was more about traditional guitar playing, flamenco style. So, I started learning this. I stayed in this [?] for about two years, even less, I think. And then I just continued on my own. I consider myself an autodidact. I have never had any academic musical training. I have always found ways to try to develop my own language, so to say. So, from guitar, I just continued and started experimenting, recording things. I would use a lot of tapes, tape machines and you know, and I just kept making music like this. And at a certain point, I also started studying cinema and especially I was very interested in sound in cinema. This was when I was in my 20s, more or less. So, yeah, all these things like guitar and sound [in] cinema. Then I was developing a lot of sound pieces that could be described as electro-acoustic music. Also, when I arrived in France, I studied that for a while. I've been more or less on my own discovering things and then just taking what I would consider that was coherent with my way of feeling and my way of experiencing sound and experiencing music and just following this sort of line that I created for myself. 

Could you maybe go more in-depth when you're talking about the language, musical expressions that you're using in your works, either in compositions or improvisational work? What do you anchor the sounds to?

So, the language, well, for me, it's a lot about listening. This is the main means for me to make music. I would not even call it a language. It's a lot about sensation for me. What I find fascinating and also very, very rich and powerful and exceptional about sound is that in its primordial state, it doesn't involve the intellectual. You know, it's really a sensation. It's a pure sensation. Sound is a sensation. So, I am very interested in that. What I practice is, as I said, just active listening and is through these listening positions that I find how I can develop a piece, a composition. But first is the listening and then is the development.

If, let's say we go to one of your concerts, one of which will also be on Friday, on the 25th of September, where you will be performing in Cankarjev dom. How do you want us to conceptualize our way of active listening? For you as an artist, as a performer of a concert, it’s definitely different than for someone in the audience. Do you wish to translate the same sensations that you're feeling to the listener or do you find them to be too limiting and just to give each their own journey?

It's rather that. It's each one their own journey. But we are together in that. For me, a concert, it's some sort of situation that it's created not only by me but also by the people that are around and that are listening. So, I see it as some sort of ritual that is not about me trying to transmit a message but it’s also leaving something together, leaving an experience together, and this experience is about listening. It's about sound. So, there's this external, so to say, situation. But then everybody internally has their own also. So, it's a juxtaposition more or less between something external and something internal and something that we share in this situation. We're creating the circumstances for that experience to happen. But also, everybody, every one of the persons that are in the audience has also their own way of living it.

What we are talking about now is listening also entails a silence on either the part of the listener or on the part of the performer. And to you, I think you use it as an element in your music quite a lot. How do you see silence as something that is neither a sound nor music or something in between or is it just a musical element that you put into your composition?

It's something that for me, it's part of the music. Of course, there are many kinds of silence and by this word, we can understand a lot of phenomena. But what [I am interested in] is this consideration that silence is part of the music. It’s part of the sound. It's the continuation. Once the sound is finished, it finishes in silence, it ends in silence. But in this silence, there's still the persistence of the perception of that sound. So, for me, it's a lot about memory and it's a lot about expanding the listening practice. For instance, I can propose a very simple example, like, if you drink something that is hot when you are drinking it [and] the liquid is still going through your throat but when there is no more of this drink, you still feel the [heat] in you, right? So for me, the silence is a little bit like that. Like, once the sound has passed, you can still experience it. And I'm interested in exploring that and it’s through the silence that I can explore that. You know, it's something that allows the experience to develop a little [further].

I mean, we all know the infamous [John] Cage performance of silence where the audience is basically giving the sounds, the music, and it changes. For you this dependence of your composition pieces - I have read in an interview that you've given - that for you the difference between your usage of improvisation and composition is also dependent upon how you think about an experienced time. And I'm interested in which method prevails in the current situation with not a lot of concerts, people, isolation, both social, cultural. How do you cope with that in your music, or is it not a concern for you?

Oh, yes, it is something that affects [me], of course, the music that I do that I've been doing this year and since quarantine, I mean, for me, the music that I make or whatever I make is very connected to the way that I live and what's happening around me and how I experience life. So, in this quarantine times and this Covid times, etc., personally, I have been in a situation where I have, as you said, no concerts at all. And I have three months of space to develop things, to do something that I wanted to. And I could just concentrate on that. So I've been recording a lot of music and taking time with that and just existing in this organic way, where you don't have a deadline, especially for this or that concert, you don't have to travel that much. You are not so in the everyday vortex and you have ahead of you this time. I have been recording a lot with Mara Winter. We were in Basel at that moment, we have been developing pieces for objects, and electronics, for flute. She's a flautist. And yeah, we were recording an album that is released now by Another Timbre, even if of course the global situation is dramatic and it's very hard, my experience of that time was also having positive elements.

How do you see this stopping of the music scene also in regards to that that you're the SHAPE artist for its 2020 rooster with the lack or at least minimizing of physical networking and a lot of festivals or concerts are hosting digital editions mostly, and not so much physical due to the limitations. Do you think that your music or your performances can be translated into a digital environment?

Well, I don't think that performance can be transferred to a digital environment. I mean, of course practically or technically it can be done. But I think the experience is so, so different. So different. I have done some stream concerts during quarantine, and wow, the sensation, the feeling is just another thing, is totally another thing than a real, shared performance with the audience in the same place, the same physical place. So, yeah, what can be developed in these times? In my experience and in my opinion, it's more the fact of recording and creating pieces and those pieces can be distributed online or [unintelligible] spaces. That's what I think will be interesting. Not really trying to extrapolate performance into a digital act, but more about, ok, we can now concentrate more on the recording. We have a lot of possibilities that can't be found in live performances and the opposite also, of course, like live performances have other possibilities that cannot happen [when] recording. So, yeah, just maybe trying to find the specificity of every way and develop it.

Or one of the new contexts for you probably will also be the performance, the installation at Tivoli park in Ljubljana where you will be presenting a Sound Garden at SONICA festival which this year hosts the theme of Paradise Haunted Garden, or “Vrt, ki ga preganja raj” in Slovenian. And could you maybe say a bit about how you understand this concept of the garden for yourself? You also saw it now in physical life. Did that change your perception of the works you will do?

Yes, yes, that was very interesting to create this piece for this installation. So, what I see about a garden is a territory, space where you make things grow. That's a garden for me. I mean, that's like the most basic definition of a garden. What this can mean in terms of sound or even in terms of artistic approach is what we do all the time as artists and as creators is making things exist, creating the circumstances that will make this or that develop. “This or that” being, in my case, sound pieces. The fact of not yet seeing the garden and space and the [?] system and having to create the piece, just imagining it was very interesting because I knew about the [?], I knew about the concept, I knew more or less how it will be, but yet I had to imagine a lot of things. And I think this [affected] the piece that I developed for that. Which is also about this piece being sort of a suggestion of an ambiguous space that is grounded in speculation, in imagination, it's quite abstract. It can be a sort of landscape, but also with strange elements. It's quite minimal also in terms of sound material. And yes, that's it.

Would you say that this, uh, speciality that you mentioned, or materiality also is how you maybe think about your compositions when you make them as such, that there is a musical spatial effect that you have in mind? But do you ever compose works or improvise and think at that moment in your head: I wanted to look that and that way.

Sometimes I can have an idea that I have not [heard] yet, it doesn't come necessarily from a sound that I have [heard], you know, and then I think, how can I go there? How can I make this exist? In general, when this happens and these are not like very, very, very specific ideas, but more about a sensation, a sensation or a kind of sound, you know, so that can develop in my imagination, in my mind. And then I try to encounter it or encounter something that will allow me to create that in the concrete world. So that happens most with the more electronic pieces, pieces that involve a lot of mixing. That's the kind of pieces that can have that. This determination and the imagination or in the ideal world, and then finding a way to the material world.

I think we are at that point that if you would have any themes still open up that we haven't yet or any remarks that you think the listeners should have about the works that you will present at SONICA, that's the time to do it.

Okay, well, what I would say is just to try to experience the sound without any, even if that's not completely possible - I am aware - but without any predisposition of what they think it will be or it will sound like but just accepting or receiving the sound just as it is, and each one just maybe integrating it into their own backgrounds and their own feelings and memories and emotions.

I think that's a great starting or ending point, depending on how you look at it. Thank you for the interview and taking the time to do it.

Thank you.

Sound compositions in the podcast are by Clara de Asís.

The podcast was produced with support from SIGIC - Slovenian Information Music Center.
Clara de Asís is an artist supported by SHAPE Platform, which is co-founded by the Creative Europe.