Carlos Maria Trindade

Lauren Martin

Thank you very much for coming to this lecture today in this beautiful theater. This is a lecture, a part of Red Bull Music Academy’s time at Lisboa Electronica. We thought it would be appropriate to have someone who has been a part of a rich and varied heritage of Portuguese music history, from pop and rock music, music that you might have bought on singles and the charts at the time, seen and performed in front of live audiences. And then also, more esoteric and international music. Music that is part of a cult record that we will be speaking about in detail today. Please help me welcome Mr. Carlos Maria Trindade.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

Hello.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Hello.

Lauren Martin

Good. You’re working. You’re with me. So, let’s go all the way back to the start. Tell me a little bit about what it was like growing up in Portugal as a young man in Lisbon, and what kind of sounds and what kind of music you were hearing on the streets at that time. Paint us a picture.

Carlos Maria Trindade

I was in the ’60s, when I was a young kid. We were living under a dictatorship, so my remembering of the country is a closed country, closed upon itself. There was nothing coming from the outside. The music, you had to get it to go to London or to go to New York to get it and to listen to it. There was one radio program called Radio Orbital, which was very good program that would show you the new things coming out in London. They would play the whole record, not just one track or the other. They wouldn’t talk in the middle. They would have a text in the beginning, and then you would know the whole record. This was very didactic, very pedagogic for a kid like me.

The only thing we listened at the time was folk music, which was patronized by the government. Fado of course, which was our urban culture of music. You had rural folk and urban fado. That was about it. Then you had the big influence of Mediterranean music like chanson française. Let’s say our mothers listened to chanson française, to the Italian music. Very much. Even the Spanish music was very popular, romantic Spanish music or the flamenco or this kind of formats.

But we were avid of going further, the new generation. Because we had listened to the Beatles. We had listened to this hippie movement and this Woodstock thing. But it was all very blurry and very distorted. The regime considered it a revolutionary thing, a dangerous thing. It would bring drugs into the country, bad habits, you know? It was very limited, as you can see. It’s not like today, where you have the internet and you can put “The Beatles” and you have all the records, all the images. It was a completely different world.

This is my remembrance. But things changed in ’74, as everybody knows. We had the revolution. The dictatorship was overthrown. We could finally have a confusion in the country. People were discussing ideas for the first time, political ideas, philosophical ideas, musical ideas. It was interesting, because Lisbon became a potpourri of a million influences that were restrained up to that moment.

I’ll give you an example. I was at the conservatoire studying piano, because my musical tuition is classic. I come from the classical world. The conservatoire, all of a sudden, the master of the school was dismissed. There was no direction. It was a bit of a chaos, of an anarchy. From that anarchy, direct meetings of people, musicians, started workshops, starting improvising together. People with different influences. The conservatoire became a kind of workshop school. I started then meeting other musicians from different tendencies and this is what opened my world.

Lauren Martin

When you spoke about bands like the Beatles, international influences and the tide of new music that was coming in, being exposed to music from the outside is being able to absorb another culture. But what changed about Portuguese music necessarily in that time? You were describing the more rural type of folk music and then the more urban kinds of music. Apart from being a young person and being overwhelmed and excited by new music from outside of Portugal, what influence did that swell have on music actually made in Portugal at the time?

Carlos Maria Trindade

It changed all the structure of the music world, of the show biz. Because we didn’t have live music room. We didn’t have PA systems. We didn’t have managers. We didn’t have technicians. We didn’t have video clip knowhow. All of a sudden we had to make everything. Not only the group, but build the management. Build the roadies. Start to build everything around us. To structure so that we wouldn’t fall into a chaotic thing, you know?

I remember going with my keyboards to the north of the country, and there was no stable electricity. I had a roadie. I was playing, and you have the memories, right? That change the sounds. As the electricity was not stable, the sounds kept changing. So I had the roadie. He was down on his knees. He was putting a finger on my preset, so that my preset wouldn’t jump. I remember this. Also remember playing without a PA system, just like...

Lauren Martin

How did that work exactly then?

Carlos Maria Trindade

It was a fair sound. You know, like you have this fairgrounds with this tiny sound, rough sound. No basses, nothing. We played like that in those conditions. Without lights, without the stage, without catering. We wouldn’t even talk about catering of course.

Lauren Martin

I think if there’s no lights you’re not too worried about catering, right? You’re playing in the dark on the floor.

Carlos Maria Trindade

If there’s no sound, you wanted a sound, you know? Electricity. The country was not prepared for electrical music, right? That’s the conclusion. Electrical music, as you know, is difficult. Because to have a sound with quality, you have to have a good technician, a good play system, and a good room, right? We hadn’t. We had to start, you know... I think that’s why punk was so popular in Portugal, because punk didn’t need much. You just need three chords on the guitar, a bit of noise, and to make a social charm. Like giving your message, rough message, then go away.

Lauren Martin

What was that message at the time if you’re drawing inspiration from punk?

Carlos Maria Trindade

I wasn’t a punk, but I played with punk musicians. That’s where I got really interested in pop music, was the new wave movement. The post-punk. The punk... I came from the classical music, so the punk seemed to me too basic, musically. The message was interesting because it was revolutionary, but the music was too basic for me. It was three chords and they’re all the same chords. You change the rhythm. That was it. When post-punk came, like new wave... New wave is not a movement, it’s a big scene where many things can put in, you know? You can put ska. You can put reggae. You can put the Clash, but you can also put the Police, you can put lots of styles in there. That’s why it was interesting. It was not a closed style.

I got interested in new wave, and that’s where I got invited to enter this Corpo Diplomático. It was the first group, not professional still, because [it was] the first organized group where I belonged. Corpo Diplomático. This was ‘79, roughly. This group would give origin to the famous Heróis Do Mar group. Heróis Do Mar was the same formation as Corpo Diplomático with another singer, because our singer was so irresponsible that we had to give him the sack. This was a bit like attitude at the moment. Nobody knew what the profession was. There was no profession, being a pop artist. We had to learn what being a pop artist was. What was the responsibilities, the schedules, being on time, rehearsing, all this. We started from scratch.

Lauren Martin

As you mentioned earlier, your schooling in music though was very, very different to this. Very different to punk, very different to new wave, and very different from discovering how to be a pop star. Tell us about you going to study music at conservatory here in Lisbon. What was the predominant school of thought about studying music at the time? Because it was a classical repertoire.

Carlos Maria Trindade

It was the harsh movement. It was the Russian discipline. My teacher, she thought discipline was more important than anything else – than sensibility, for instance. She would tap my fingers each time I would make some wrong movement or play the wrong note. It was very harsh. You had to study lots of hours. You wouldn’t get 20. You would get a 12, 13 note. It was very difficult to be good.

I remember being in a room playing some jazz chords on the piano. And comes someone in the room and says, “This is not allowed, what you’re playing. This is not classical. This is diminished sevens and nines. You cannot play these chords on this piano.” I was astonished. Why was jazz anti-musical? I started asking questions. I was a kid. I said, “This is not right.” If jazz is not allowed, there’s something wrong. I left the classical world because I entered the new electrical group. I liked the organ. There were no synthesizers still, so I played the organ in this group. I started buying synthesizers. The Moog came out. The Clavinet came out. The Fender Rhodes came out. All the electrical gadgets start coming out and affecting the music in real time.

This is why all the ’80s and even the ’70s, but above all the ’80s. You would listen the new rhythmic machine from Korg on a certain record. You’d go, “Wow, this is the new Korg rhythmic machine.” Music and technology, they were really attached.

Lauren Martin

The organ is an instrument that has followed you around for pretty much your whole career. What was the first time that you saw and heard an organ being played and thought, “Yeah, this is for me”?

Carlos Maria Trindade

The alternative was the piano, but the piano is a piece of furniture. You cannot carry it. In Portugal, there were no rooms with a piano. You had to move. If you were a keyboard player, you would have to go for an organ. There was no alternative. It was an organ. It was electric. It could play loud with the guitars, and even had the bass on the feet. It had two keyboards where you could have two different sounds, so it was paradise for me. It was, “Wow, what a power. I can pump up the volume.” This was all very new.

Then came the synthesizers. To play with the guitars, you had to be loud, so the piano was no good. I had to go electrical, and so I did. Nowadays, I’m a little bit on the opposite side. I go back to the natural sounds. I play piano, acoustical piano. I play Fender Rhodes. I play Clavinet. I went back to all these vintage sounds. But this is the consequence of not nostalgia, but the necessity to go further on the technique, I think. Sometimes the keyboards are too easy sometimes.

Lauren Martin

Was your interest in the organ ever spurned from the more grand, like, spiritual church organ as well?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes. When I went to conservatoire, I didn’t want to learn piano. My aim was to enroll in the organ classes. But there was only one teacher, and there were no vacancies. So they said, “If you want to start this year, you either go to the piano, or you stay at home and come next year and enroll in the organ classes.” So I went to piano. But I wanted the organ. The organ always made me the creeps in the churches. So I wanted to be... There’s another thing I like about the organ, is that you turn your back on the audience. See what I mean? You’re not visible. Organ music comes from God, from the spheres. It’s meant to resonate on stones of the chapel or of the church and to impress the listeners. To impress the people that are assisting to the Mass. I like that role, which is not visible, but... You are free. You have no social contact with the audience. I like that. But then I got into a trap. I got into a pop group that became famous. So it’s the opposite.

Lauren Martin

It’s a very un-pop star thing to want to turn your back and be unknown.

Carlos Maria Trindade

It’s a punk thing as well.

Lauren Martin

It’s a punk thing.

Carlos Maria Trindade

I got into a trap. I wanted to play the organ, and I did. I played the organ, but it’s not the church organ. I wanted to not become famous, and I did. I didn’t want people to take my photos, and they did. I was on the front covers of the newspapers and everything, and plus we made the group that was highly polemic. It was accused of being a Nazi group. I’ll tell you why, because our first record had this cover. [shows album cover] This cover has the cross, right? This is the front of a boat, a fishing boat. We took this symbology, because we needed one, and people called it Nazi. This is not the only reason. Heróis Do Mar, as you know, it’s the first three words of our national anthem. The English tune starts with... ?

Lauren Martin

You’re putting me on the spot. I don’t know what the first words of “God Save The Queen” is.

Carlos Maria Trindade

You don’t know?

Lauren Martin

I don’t sing it very often, I’m afraid.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Anyway, Heróis Do Mar is the beginning of our... These two elements are very strong. That’s why we chose them. They are strong. Unfortunately, this was 1980, and we had the revolution in ‘74, which means people were still fed up with and afraid of a new dictatorship, right? People said, “No, these guys are fascists. We must stop this.” When this went into the shops, people didn’t put it on the, how do you say? On the montre.

Lauren Martin

On the counter?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yeah, they wouldn’t show it. They were afraid. So the record didn’t sell much. We made a meeting and we said, “Are we going to finish? No, we cannot finish. We must carry on.” The label was very worried because they were getting pressures. Nobody wanted the record in the shops. It was not selling. When we would go to the radio to make an interview, everybody was menacing us with swastikas on the glasses of the radio station. We said the only thing to do is a dance hit. We made a dance hit. We made the first dance hit sang in Portuguese. It’s called “Amor,” which means love. We made this huge hit and released the maxi[-single], and it was... All the discotheques were passing this. All the radio stations. We sold I think 80 thousand maxi-singles in two weeks or something like that. And so we became professionals. That’s it. And the polemic went away because meanwhile, people...

We were talking about the discoveries of the Portuguese overseas. All the adventure that was going on in a small, wooden how-do-you-say now? A ship. You’d cross the Atlantic and you would discover new worlds, so this was the story of our record. This is our cross of the Templars. It’s a religious order, but they are also fighters.

We wanted to be strongly symbolic, but maybe we went a little bit too much on the symbology. If it was today, it would be okay. Nobody would care. In those times, the country was very political. All conversations were about politics because the country was choosing his way. Where do we go? It’s what everybody was discussing, which it’s good to discuss where you are going.

This was what allowed us to become professional musicians. From here on, I started producing and helping other bands in the studio and started a professional life. That’s it.

Lauren Martin

When you talk about becoming a professional musician, studying at a conservatory for classical music, classical repertoire, having your fingers tapped for playing jazz, the cognitive dissonance between that and playing new wave music and releasing pop singles, what of your musical education did you take with you into studios? Or was it just a total breach?

Carlos Maria Trindade

No, it’s very useful. I’ll tell you, studying music doesn’t go away. It stays with you. Reading music, it’s extremely important when you work with other musicians, because you can take your own notes and you can be always on the right point in the arrangements, in the structure of the music. You can be very organized. As you know in popular music, not many people read. It’s not necessary. You write lyrics, you play a few chords, then you make a song. You don’t have to read music.

Reading music for a producer is very, very important. For instance, comes a brass player and plays a wrong note. You know you play the wrong note because you have the score, right? If you didn’t have, you would have to listen to all the notes, it would be difficult. My education being classical was very important because it’s a weapon you have.

Lauren Martin

You might not have taken a church organ with you on tour. That wouldn’t quite have worked, so kind of set the scene for us. What were the contemporary music technologies that you were using at this time that you were able to develop this sound? Because new wave is very related to British and American pop music and it’s all over the continent, but I’m curious about if these machines are becoming much more accessible and everyone can kind of get them. What specifically was it about your sound that felt akin to Portuguese pop and new wave? What was special about it for you? What were these technologies that allowed you to do that?

Carlos Maria Trindade

The sound was not strictly Portuguese but the lyrics were. We were one of the first groups to write in Portuguese. Generation before ours, which is the ’70s generation, used to sing in English, funnily enough. They were good groups, very good groups we had. But they were singing in English. We asked ourselves, “Why in English? Why not in Portuguese?” Because Portuguese is a very difficult language to sing. It’s true. We have funny sounds in our language. When I’ve been touring abroad, people confound us with Russians. Once they came to us and asked, “Are you Russian musicians?” “No, we are Portuguese.” “Ah, Portuguese. Your sounds are similar to Russian.” Maybe, yeah. We have these kind of “r”s which are the same in Russian. These sounds make it difficult to write good lyrics.

We got specialized. We started studying how to write in Portuguese and sing. This was the main difference, because the rest we were using mics like everybody else. We were using the Roland, Korg, the instruments that were the international makes. It was not through the sound but through the lyrics basically.

Lauren Martin

Can you tell us more then about how the language and the act of writing lyrics impacted on the actual sounds itself? Could we perhaps listen to a record from that time with some Portuguese lyrics and then you could tell us how the language would have impacted the music itself?

Carlos Maria Trindade

It impacts, some things are not possible. The rhymes are completely different. English language is open. It’s much easier to make a rhyme. When you sing, you go ah. Ah is good for the singer. If you have to go “u,” “e”... We have this “e,” which is very common in our language; it’s terrible for singers because it’s nasal. Nasal means part of the air goes through your mouth and part goes through your nose. We even have this “til.” You know this sign? You don’t have it in English. The Spanish use it on top of the “n.” We use it on top of the “a”s to make... For instance, a til on top of an “a” with an “o” goes “owe.” Which is nasal. Otherwise it would be “ow.” These little things make you think. Owe is very difficult, so I’ll change the word for another thing and I’ll change the rhyme.

Plural in Portuguese is with an “s.” You must go, irmão is brother in Portuguese. There you go with the til. If you want the plural, several irmãos. We put an “s” on the end. This is terrible for singing. So you have to know these kinds of things.

In English, “brother,” it’s easy to sing. Brother, brother! Irmão. It’s a big difference.

Lauren Martin

I get your point. Absolutely.

Carlos Maria Trindade

We had to study. Sometimes it’s very difficult. Sometimes you only realize when the singer comes and says, “This is impossible. What are you writing? I cannot sing this in this octave.” You go and change.

Lauren Martin

I’m interested then why continue to do it in Portuguese and not just go, “We’ll just sing ‘brother.’ We’ll just sing English.”

Carlos Maria Trindade

Because it was a path that hadn’t been done. It had been done in fado and in folk, but never in the electric music. We wanted to give it a try. Nowadays you have groups writing in Portuguese and in English. It’s not so important if you do it. We’ve done it because at the time, there was nobody singing in Portuguese. The records singing in Portuguese started to sell because of us and [foreign language], another singer. The labels wouldn’t believe that music sang in Portuguese would ever sell. They started to see sales, so they started to invest. That’s how we created the rock movement of the ’80s in Portugal that produced about, I don’t know, hundreds of groups. Hundreds. Every day you’d have a new group, it was amazing.

Lauren Martin

Shall we listen to something from that time so that everyone can get in the zone?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes we can. We can listen to, for instance...

Lauren Martin

Something of your own would be ideal.

Carlos Maria Trindade

For the lyrics, we can listen to this artist. He’s not among us anymore. It’s called António Variações. I produced his last record, along with Pedro Ayres, my partner. And we can listen to the first track, maybe. It’s kind of a singer that gave us a big... It was very pleasant to produce because his energy was amazing.

(music: António Variações – unknown)

Lauren Martin

So tell us a little bit about that track that we just heard. What was your role in it? Because I can see, even though my Portuguese isn’t great, that you did play a hand in that record. So tell us a little bit about that and the sounds that we were working with at the time, because that feels extremely of its time as well.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yeah. It is. This is an example of a singer that had no group, right? He had no musicians. So what the label did was contract a few musicians to make his records. He only released two records, then he died. He was the first case of AIDS in Portugal, very first case of AIDS. And he died just after making this record.

He made two records. The label was very intelligent. It was EMI. They decided to give his first record to a Portugal group and the second record to a Lisbon group, right? Lisbon group was Heróis Do Mar. And the Portugal group was [says band’s name in Portuguese]. It’s also a very popular group that still exists. Still exists.

So what they did is if this singer doesn’t have musicians but he wants to be a pop artist, we’re going to give the production to a group. Not a producer, but to a group. And it was a clever... it worked. It was a clever move, because they... Both records are different. And when you ask for a group to make a record you have the arrangements resolved, you have the production resolved, you know? Even the sound was a bit our sound, but with a different singer, right? So it was quite interesting.

Lauren Martin

What would you say your sound was at the time then?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Our sound was one thing live and another thing on record. Why? Because we didn’t have the know-how to make records. There was not, as we were the first ones to go into the studio with a different approach towards electrical music. There was no know-how. We didn’t have anybody to tell us, do this, do that. We were experimenting with the mixer, with the instruments. And so if you listen to some records today, you say, “Ah, this is not very good sound.” But the ideas are there. The studios were not investing in technology because it was very expensive. Outboards, good reverberations, good compressors. We had nothing of the kind. We had to improvise, you know? And so now there is two generations of recording musicians, and you have know-how. You have schools. So at the time we were experimenting, which is also good. It’s also good. Yeah.

Lauren Martin

That’s very good. Speaking of experimenting in that regard, we’re going to travel over quite a lot of genres and decades today. And this is coming at the tail end of... This is like the mid-’80s.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes.

Lauren Martin

Like ’84. What kind of access did you personally have to these technologies, if you’re saying that there wasn’t much of an industry to access? Where were you sourcing these machines from and who were you working with? Set the scene for us in that regard.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Our role was to make some pressure on the studios to buy material, right? So we were saying, if you want a greater sound, you must invest on a good equalizer, a good compressor, a good, you know, all these kind of things that the studio didn’t have. They had good mixing mixers, but they had nothing else. And so we were buying all these magazines to study the machinery, and we were telling the studios, buy this. You must buy this. You must buy that. And then they started, because with the success of the records, the money started pouring in, the editors started selling. The studios started having a job, you know? And they started to be well-equipped. At the same time, we were learning what the management does, learning what is merchandising, learning how to dress to go on stage, learning how to make a good lighting system. All this was... we were the first generation to deal with it, you know?

Lauren Martin

So you were essentially being rewarded through music sales...

Carlos Maria Trindade

We were pushing our way, you know. Pushing our way in saying you must invest, you must do this, you must do that. So that’s what we did.

Lauren Martin

What other kinds of music were you listening to at the time to get inspiration? If you’re saying that... although you were writing the lyrics in Portuguese, it was not super specifically a Portuguese style. Who else were you listening to at the time that was influential for you?

Carlos Maria Trindade

The music, after this French and Italian, chanson française. The Mediterranean sound came with the Beatles and that generation of groups. The English sound, right? The English and the American sound. They entered, accompanied by the hippie folklore. All this hippie folklore that we listen to, that we saw abroad, came here and you started to have all styles of music that you have today. You started to have rock, folk, electrical music, you know? All electric music.

We were very influenced in fact by all kinds of sonorities. Meanwhile, groups like Pink Floyd were coming out. This was before, but the new wave groups were very strong, you know, because the sounds were very eclectic, very different. There was not a rule, right? This is not symphonic rock, it’s not reggae, it’s not... What is it? And that’s why I liked new wave. You didn’t know what it was. It was not a style, it was a kind of a movida, a kind of a way of life. Nightclubbing came. All this was interesting in the ’80s.

Lauren Martin

Let’s leave Portugal and go to London. You spent some time in London in the ’70s I believe. What were you doing in London and who did you meet?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Oh, I was not making music, I was surviving basically, yeah. Because I had fled the country. I didn’t go... We had the war in Africa. I didn’t want to go to a war, I didn’t want to kill people. So I said I must go away. And so I forged all the authorizations necessary, and I fled. I went to Paris, Amsterdam, hitchhiking, and then I couldn’t stay in Amsterdam and I went to London and got a job in a hotel washing dishes, doing whatever. And I was two years working here and there, knowing several parts of England, and then meanwhile there was a revolution in ’74 so I could come back, and that’s it. It was two years of exile.

Lauren Martin

Self-imposed exile, almost.

Carlos Maria Trindade

It was a self-imposed exile, but I was very interested because I could see concerts in London. So I could see, I don’t know, I even saw... I think I saw Pink Floyd in Hyde Park. I saw Soft Machine. I saw all these groups in pubs, you know. Pubs had a lot of music. I don’t know if they still have, but...

Lauren Martin

Yes they do.

Carlos Maria Trindade

They do, but I was amazed by the amount of music there was in a town like London. Because each pub had its group, plus you had the concerts in the parks. Free concerts in the parks. Plus you had the good venues to go and listen. And so I was happy to go to concerts and absorb, a thing that was impossible here.

Lauren Martin

There was a style that was really burgeoning at the time, particularly in the ’70s, with minimalism and experimental minimalism and ambient music. I know that you spent some time with David Toop. Is that correct?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yeah.

Lauren Martin

Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit more about who he is and what you two would have discussed and learned together when it comes to music?

Carlos Maria Trindade

You’re asking me we discussed with? I discussed who, what with? With who?

Lauren Martin

With David Toop.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Ah, David Toop. No, I was invited. This was a few years later. I was invited to go to participate on a London festival of improvised music. And David Toop was the organizer that year. They had the London Musicians Collective organization, which was based on a unused train station, OK? It was interesting.

And so I met all these avant-garde, improvised music milieu, which was a thing that I didn’t know even existed. With gigs, organized tours and things. And so I met all these musicians that were not pop musicians, jazz musicians. They were dissident from all these kinds of musics and they were trying to play together, improvising.

So I found it very interesting because I had been reading John Cage, I had been listening to Brian Eno and his amazing theories about sound and music and I got very much interested in going on other areas, into other areas, that were not the pop-framed pop music, you know. Which is... Pop music is... It has a frame like this. [draws a small square in the air with his finger] You cannot go away from that. And it’s very social. You must interact. You must be visible, and all these movements are the opposite. The music is a bit for itself. The music is an abstract art that lives on itself. It doesn’t matter much the portrait of the musician who does it, you know?

Lauren Martin

Apart from the social and aesthetic aspects then of not being a pop star in that regard, what about the music and the sonics did you find particularly interesting? Because this is a style that you would go on to work with to quite some acclaim.

Carlos Maria Trindade

I think pop music produced very interesting personalities that were dissident from pop music. And Robert Fripp is an example. Brian Eno is another example. It’s examples of musicians that were involved into very popular and famous groups, made tours around the world. Fripp with King Crimson, Brian Eno with Roxy Music, but they said, “I’m not staying here, I’m going away.” Brian Eno for instance decided to go away, as he says when he was playing a gig, and instead of being concentrated on the concert, he was thinking that he had laundry to wash. See what I mean? He was not there anymore. So he said, “I’m doing nothing. I’m leaving,” right? And he started all these interesting ambient music thing. Through these people that went away from the pop music, I think it’s very interesting to find them doing a myriad of things that evolved the music business to other parameters and other experiences.

Lauren Martin

Well, your sound evolved kind of in the same way and I think maybe we should talk about a record that you made in 1991. Shall we listen to something from that?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes. This is an example of going away from pop, you know? Going away from pop and doing something else in a duo. It’s called “Blu Terra.” It’s from Mr. Wollogallu, a record made with Nuno Canavarro. Oops.

Lauren Martin

It’s fine.

(music: Carlos Maria Trindade / Nuno Canavarro – “Blu Terra”)

Lauren Martin

What was that we were listening to? Tell us little bit about that.

Carlos Maria Trindade

“Blu Terra” is a track from Nuno’s side. We divided the record into two sides, right? My side and Nuno’s side. But we interacted in the arrangements, so it’s interesting methods. This is an example of coming away from the pop world and closing yourself in a room for six months and doing this, without listening to any music. Just two musicians, two computers, a mixer, a Dolby system, a few outboards, synthesizers and samplers and your imagination. And that’s it.

Lauren Martin

Because you were in Heróis do Mar for pretty much the whole ’80s.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes.

Lauren Martin

’81 to ’89. And then this comes, you record this in ’89.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes.

Lauren Martin

And it comes out about...

Carlos Maria Trindade

’90.

Lauren Martin

A year or two later.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yeah.

Lauren Martin

The stylistic leap from Heróis do Mar to this record is quite astonishing. Can you tell us a little bit about how you met your collaborator, Nuno Canavarro, and what compelled you to start making this music?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well, let’s say that this was already inside us. But we were busy doing pop. On the other side it was pop that allowed us to be professionals and living on music, through music, not having to do other jobs, right? So pop had this limitation but also this advantage, OK? This kind of music, at the time we wouldn’t live on this kind of music. The record was praised but passed unknown. There was not much public at the time in Portugal for this kind of music, and the label was an independent small label, didn’t have the power to export the records and promote it abroad. So it went into a...

A few people always were listening to it and saying, “Ah, this record is intemporal. It seems like it was made yesterday. How could you do that?” And I was amazed when these Spanish editors from Barcelona contacted me through Facebook and say, “I was listening to this record you made and I think it’s magic. Do you want to release it?” And I said, “What? 27 years afterwards?” “Yeah, yeah, we think it’s magic. We want to release it. Can we get licenses and everything?”

We started this process that took one year to try and free it from contracts from previous release, to make a contract, to make a new mastering, to make the original cover, everything. And they were very good, very competent, and they made a fantastic release and they put it alive again. It’s amazing.

Lauren Martin

Did you own your own master tapes of this record? Did you physically have them, or were they in the control of someone else?

Carlos Maria Trindade

No, there was nothing. Even the art cover was lost. Even this art cover was lost. This cover has a very funny story. It’s from the portfolio of an artist that is our friend, a painter. Can you open to take this little stripe out? And I went to his home and asked, “Can you show me your portfolio? Because I like your work and we are doing a record, and maybe you have some drawing or something that could be good?” And I find this. And then we didn’t have a title, so as I was reading some ethnomusicology book by Claude Lévi-Strauss and it had some names of African instruments, I went to the book and saw this wollogallu. Wollogallu is an African drum, earth drum. So it’s a hole you open on the ground and then you cover this hole with either thin wood or a skin, animal skin or even better a small tin thing or metal...

Lauren Martin

A sheet metal.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yeah. And then you play drums on top of it and the earth resonates. The whole soil resonates. And I think I liked the idea of wollogallu and as we had this personagem, we made it Mr. Wollogallu. It was just like a joke, but it worked and...

Lauren Martin

So you’re a musician that resonates with the earth in this regard?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes. Yes. I read a lot about the origins of music because when you work, when you deal with your profession, you should know the history of the profession, and our profession is dealing with sound. So I’m always, even today, very much interested in the origins of sound and in sounds in general. That’s why I moved to the country, to... I moved to the country, people asked me, “Why did you move to the country?” Because I have silence. That’s it. So from silence, I can work my music. If I don’t have silence, like in the city you don’t have silence because you have a constant humming of about 10-15 dBs, right? Constant. And your limiar [threshold] goes from 15 to whatever. 100. But I have from 0 to 100. So I have dynamics because I have absolute silence. Sometimes, of course. Sometimes, you have planes passing by. Even at 10,000 meters, I can listen to planes in the country.

But it’s interesting to know the history of sound, and this drum... ground drums were the first instruments of the world. Not with metal, but with skins and with other materials. But the original one, people who study think it was not the drums. It was the voice of the mother. So it was lullabies. The very first songs, the very first musical sounds that the humans invented, let’s say, were lullabies for the babies. Even... so the mother would entertain the children with lullabies. So you have the human voice, the female human voice, and the drums as the origin of instrumental music, right? Which is very interesting.

That’s where wollogallu comes from, because wollogallu is an ethno thing and the record has a lot of ethno little micro-atmospheres. So it’s interesting.

Lauren Martin

Those atmospheres come from a discipline within music that is akin to Fourth World music, that’s the concept. I know you’re a fan of Jon Hassell.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes.

Lauren Martin

Kind of forefather of this style. What about Fourth World music do you find interesting and was applicable for this record?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well in fact we were assembling from radio, from TV, from video. We were sampling from records, because samplers were machines that had just come out. We had... my sampler could sample 13 seconds, which was magic. But nowadays it’s ridiculous, because in computers you can sample 10 hours, if you want, of sound. So we had to make big gymnastics to put the samples. With the time we had, we had to be really economical to make the samplings. So we were... sampling was a recording process that gave a lot of power to the musician, because all of a sudden, you not only had the sounds inside the modules and the synthesizers, but you could put sounds from the outside into the synthesizers and mix it. And this record is a bit of those experimentations we made, you know?

Lauren Martin

What sources were you sampling from for tracks on this record in particular? Because there is quite a murky sense of cultural fusion that comes with Fourth World music that seems very much as a colonial kind of music tourism that doesn’t honor the sources of the sounds.

Were you doing a lot of these field recordings yourself? Were you drawing from film and television? What kind of specific examples could you give us that are present in your work here?

Carlos Maria Trindade

The samples were a bit... this record had a very, how should I say, exigent selection. We made two records, and only one came out. We had, more, ten or twelve tracks that never came out. The rest, it got lost. It was on cassette tape and it got lost.

The samples you listen here are a bit, how would I say? Random. It’s random, like, Nuno would have some ideas and would show me, and I’d say, “Wow, that’s fantastic.” But you’d have to agree that it was fantastic; otherwise, it wouldn’t be released.

The same with me, and so we were very exigent on the selection we made. But we were really going mad, sampling everything because it was a novelty. It was very recent technology. Maybe if it was today; today I’m not sampling so much. I’m using more of the synthesized sounds. Everything’s been sampled; if you listen, we sampled in factories, industrial sounds, the urban sounds, everything. We sampled the voice and tune it up, we reverse it, we do whatever. Today you can do choirs of nonexistent persons. You can just compose for an orchestra without a violin. It’s not a novelty anymore.

Lauren Martin

Because it was a novelty then, though, I’m curious to keep it kind of contemporary. Maybe were there acoustic instruments that you were working with, that were able to tell a story that was specific to your experience? For example there are a lot of strings on this record and I’m curious to know if that came from the 12-stringed Portuguese guitar and the story-telling element of that. Is there a story behind the strings too? That is specifically Portuguese, perhaps?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes, because the concept of the record is instrumental, it’s not sang. You can listen to some voices, but they are sampled, right? We have never had a singer in the studio. Everything was done by us two.

We didn’t have an external opinion. It was very difficult if you think that you are five months closed in a room, two heads, discussing. We discussed a lot and we were... talked a lot. Doing music is very tiring, so we would make breaks. Tea breaks. In the tea breaks we would talk about everything but music. Everything but music; traveling, Africa, I dunno. Any subject.

These ideas we discussed would go into our work somehow. It was a lonesome project, so we have to find techniques of making a record without the voice, without the singer. Because in the pop music you have singer all the time, right? The music is made for a singer, and for the first time we were doing instrumental music.

So we had to come up with all these tricks, little ambiances and strings. Because the string is the second most powerful thing after the voice. It’s the violin, the expressiveness, the ambient it suggests. So we had to invent interesting atmospheres beyond the human voice.

Lauren Martin

I’m surprised, actually, that you would say the string is the second most expressive, seeing as you’ve played organ and keys for your whole career.

Carlos Maria Trindade

The organ is not expressive. You don’t have dynamics. You either put it on or you put it off, right? The violin has vibrato, you can grow your sound, you can do very... interpretation, dramatic interpretation. What we were looking for was dramatism, which is difficult to do with synthesizers, dramatism and synthesizers are not done for dramatic expressiveness. They are done for electronic or for sequencing or, you know, it’s more on that way.

We may the question of playing everything. This record is all played, it’s not sequenced. We made a couple of concerts and we played these pieces alive, and people were coming onstage to see if there was sequencing, backtrack, and they couldn’t find one.

Lauren Martin

Describe to us then, what it would’ve looked like to see this performed live, if there were no sequencers being used on stage. How did it look? How did it move?

Carlos Maria Trindade

It doesn’t move. It’s two people seated, one in front of the other, so it’s not very interesting.

Lauren Martin

Surrounded by what, though?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Surrounded by machines, and the only thing that is alive is the music. This is our idea, it’s the anti-pop, right? You have no painting on your face, you have no strong lights, spotlights. We didn’t even have lights. The light was still. It’s the anti-show, right? It’s the anti-show.

It’s the music by itself, but it’s one of the most interesting concerts I ever made, if you ask me.

Lauren Martin

It sounds not too dissimilar to you trying to play keyboards in the north of Portugal with the press button.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well, now that it’s different, we have good electricity. We have internet. You know, it’s so, so different, the world. We have maybe too much information nowadays. It’s the opposite, you know. We complained about not having information in the ’70s. Now, perhaps, we complain there is too much information and you must filter – which is the most difficult thing, filter your information.

Lauren Martin

Actually, speaking of filtering the information that might have gone into this record, when you said that you didn’t really talk about the process so much; you just went in and did it. What kind of spiritual or conceptual things were you thinking about? I know that your attachment to the organ did stem from the sense of spirituality and the devotional power of this instrument. Were you thinking about spirituality when you were making this record?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well we had the reclusion like a monastery, right? You were not listening to any music. It was part of the contract not to be influenced, right? Because when you listen to much music, one thing is influence. The other thing is when you listen so much that it becomes part of your musical technique, right? And this is dangerous, because you show it immediately and people listen and say, “Ah, this is a bit like dah, dah, dah, dah.” “Ah, this is a bit like dah, dah, dah, dah.” And you’re done.

If you are like dah, dah, dah, dah – dah, dah, dah, is better, right? Imitation is never better. So, we were thinking, “We must be original, and we don’t have a singer, and we only have this stuff.” We were really full of responsibility of this, because Nuno is a very serious person. When it comes to music, I’m also very serious so we were really serious about it like, “Whoa, how are we gonna do this and all this?” Through this responsibility, we made a good selection and only the best came out.

We could’ve made a double record, or another records, but we would have chop, chop, chop, chop, chop it out. Chop it out, it’s not good enough, chop it out. This was better. But there is a monastery attitude towards... it’s hard, because during five months, you don’t go out, you don’t listen to other music. Because you don’t want to, because you’re already tired of working all day long.

So we would talk, talk, talk. Not about music but about other things. Talk, talk. This talking and exchange of ideas worked. What I say to musicians is don’t just talk about music. Talk about other things, because you’re gonna learn something that will influence you on your next tune, on your next ambient, on your next one, your next music.

But there is a religious attitude because I was a Catholic-brought child. Very strongly Catholic and I’m a dissident because of that. But the religious impact stood; it’s still here. So I need relgiosity, not necessarily Christian. I’m more inclined to Buddhism nowadays. I think it’s a clever religion, because it centers yourself into yourself. God is here, he’s not in the sky. See what I mean? He’s inside you, so I find it more interesting, you know?

Lauren Martin

And you feel that that tendency, or tendency towards an interest towards Buddhism, was fed into the process of making the record, then?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes. Buddhism talks a lot about, and Buddhist poetry talks about, a lot about nature and silence. So, nature is one thing I’m surrounded by now, which is good. Nature is, for me nowadays, almost as important as humankind. Which is a thing that a few years ago, I was completely urban and I wouldn’t think about it. I would say, “No, no, no, no. I need people around me.” What I could was, get silence and the importance of nature. So this goes along with Buddhism, more than with Catholicism, I think.

Lauren Martin

Because David Toop, actually, once said that silence is a kind of noise. It has its own information, and you just have to be perceptive enough to understand that information. It’s interesting that you’ve become more inclined to nature when you’re around silence.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes, silence is the support of music. It’s like the canvas is the support of the painter on canvas. So, you come from silence, which is zero music, and you start building from there. When you put a wrong sound on a track, you’ll never get the track back, because the wrong sound is there.

Sometimes you have to destroy and go back and take away that sound and put another one, a good one, so that the things work. I always remember Brian Eno, he was mixing; he was composing on his studio, and there was some works on the next building. He was listening to a humming of a machine that was going mmmmmm, all the time. He never realized it, so he was composing around that sound; around it. When the work’s finished, he was listening to the tape. “This doesn’t work!” he said. “Ah I know why it didn’t work; the machine sound isn’t there anymore.”

He had to recreate the kind of a drone, imitating the machine, so that the piece could work. This is amazing. This is a person who listens good, which is what we are specialized in. Musicians should be specialized in listening good. But it’s not always the case.

Lauren Martin

I find it interesting, then, that your musical journey would be to become a better musician, you have to become a better listener first.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes, I think so. Especially... well, maybe not in the pop music, because pop music is formatted. I found musicians that didn’t even listen to the whole group on stage, and I found it very strange. I said, “You don’t listen to the bass?” “Nah, nah, nah, it’s too loud, I don’t want to listen to the bass.” I said, “How do you play with them?” “Ah, we know, we know. It’s a routine.” See what I mean?

Lauren Martin

Do you feel, then, you’ve become – what’s the best way to say this – a bit more cynical about pop music, having done records like this?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Yes. Not only about pop music but society in general, because we are... I think we are moving away from things. The offer is so good, so big, so, you know, the more we have, the more we want. This is our nature. We all know about it.

We all have a lot. Lots of informations, lots of new cars, lots of technology. We even are having lots of people controlling this technology, affecting the statistics with logarithms, trying to control yourselves, as you’ve seen recently. It’s dangerous times we’re living in, I think. They’re not naïve anymore. But I’m not, I don’t want to go back to naïveté. I don’t want to go back to dictatorship and the lack of information. What I think is we should educate our kids to filter. This is what they need, is a filter because can you imagine the information they’re gonna get in one generation time? It’s gonna be huge, because maybe it comes already from the moon or from Mars. When you start putting all these planets with people living in it and information coming from there, can you imagine what is going to happen?

Lauren Martin

If you make this on earth, I’d be very curious to hear what you might make on Mars.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well, yeah, this record I think is good for an astronaut. Could be good for an astronaut to listen to.

Lauren Martin

Carlos, thank you very much.

Carlos Maria Trindade

It was a pleasure.

Lauren Martin

Thank you, yeah. [applause] Does anybody have any questions for Carlos? Anyone? Anything you’re curious about at all?

Audience Member

Thank you. I really liked your second album; you made me think a little bit about Japanese sounds from the ’70s, specially the more minimalistic movement. You were speaking as well about Buddhism, so I kind of connect the dots between the ohm and the minimalism. Did it have an influence on your work?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Did we have?

Audience Member

Did it have an influence in your work, Japanese music?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well, not only Japanese music but Japanese society itself, because the first contact with Japanese society was, for me, was like, “What’s this? What’s this hierarchy? What’s this futuristic way of life?” The way they live, it’s suburban, it’s crazy.

Then you start going into the minds of people and what you find, they are extremely polite. If you go and play in Japan, the public has a reverence towards the artists. At the end of the show they come and offer you things, like presents. They make a queue and they come with things – flowers, tea, painting. Even paintings they used to offer us.

This reverence makes the relationship with silence that I was talking about in Buddhism, which is respect. Sound is a thing that, if I make noise, if I’m painting, nobody listens on the other room. If I’m making noise, everybody’s going to listen to this noise on a circle of, I dunno, how many meters?

You must think that noise is like water. If it finds a little hole, it goes. I think this reverence makes you think that we are in a noisy society, and not only ideologically but because of this all, all this information and all this noise about truth. It’s more and more difficult to find the truth, right?

Before, you had one father that told you the truth and you could not move from there, right? This is no good, either. But now it’s the opposite. You have many truths and you have to find a good one. The Japanese have a very hierarchical society, a very harsh one. It’s a laborers society, it’s made for work. They are in the firms about 13 hours a day, even if they are sleeping on a corner. But they must be there. If they are not there, they’re not well seen by the boss.

It’s very harsh. But when they come out and go for a drink they are amazingly non-brutal. I never saw in Japan an aggression on the street, never. I never saw two Japanese fighting, how is it possible in towns like that with millions of people? That must be something they learned. It’s not American so it must’ve been, it’s not the Marshall Plan, it must’ve been Buddhism, the origins, maybe. I think about this.

I will always be influenced by this Oriental pacifism that I don’t find in the West. I find, OK, we are in a very competitive society, but we cannot avoid fighting. We should be competitive without fighting, through your work, right? Not through... Again, or through, ahhh, you know. This is what I don’t like in our society. It’s too aggressive, physically aggressive. And the Japanese society is specific. They have other fights. They have very strong fights. For instance, the role of the woman is still a fight for the woman, because there is a lot of laws in Japan that consider the woman still serving the man.

This is the other side of ancestry, of history. In general, I love Japanese frame of mind. I call it software. They have a different software.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Lauren Martin

Anyone else?

Audience Member

Hi, thank you for everything you said, it was precious. You were talking about the fact that musicians should specialize in listening good, but also the fact that our daily life is ruled by over-information.

How do you think these two things relate? How can we perceive or filter everyday sounds with so much noise around us, and how can we educate towards this awareness of sound?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Well, I think it’s a very slow process. For instance, maybe a few people in this room have never thought about this. So, the fact that I’m saying this, maybe people start thinking, “Oh yeah, when I do a sound, other people listen. When I paint, people don’t listen, it’s different.” They don’t see... We have to have an altruistic attitude towards sound. Not me and my sound, but be sensitive to other people’s sounds.

Even the urban sound can be interesting. Even a factory sound can be interesting. But it’s not next to my room, where I sleep, see what I mean? It’s on the place for being a factory. What we have to do is to open our ears the same way we open our eyes. We are in a visual society, basically, not in an aural society.

So our ears, if you see a dog or a cat, it can move the ears, right? When he moves the ears, he listens on that direction, and each ear moves in a different direction. They are highly sophisticated in listening. We are very basic, because our ears that used to move before, don’t move anymore. Why? Because we don’t have necessity to move. But they used to move.

We are not the best at listening. We listen to about 20,000 hertz at the maximum. Well, let’s say 17,000. And cats and dogs listen to 50,000 60,000 hertz, so they can listen to a noise that happens on the other side of the street and we can’t. We should be humble. We are not most sophisticated beings on earth. As far as it goes on listening, we are one of the worst. So we should be humble and educate our ears, more and more. Maybe we are not developing our ears as we are our eyes and our ability to manipulate technology.

Lauren Martin

Anyone else? We do have time if you’re curious, but, if not that’s also okay. No?

Well, thank you. Oh wait, hang on! He wants another one. Hang on. You’re only allowed two maximum.

Audience Member

Sorry to be so annoying. You were talking about your album that was released on label from Barcelona. Lena D’Água’s Jardim Zoológico was made as a repress on a label from New Zealand as well. Do you think there is more recognition from our work, our more experimental work that was done in the ’70s and in the ’80s by other countries than inside our own country?

Carlos Maria Trindade

Maybe there is, it’s not my role to say. But what is amazing is that with this final nostalgia that is happening, that it’s the most interesting thing in the industry, in the music industry, happening.

The CD format was a flop. It was very interesting for the labels to make money during the ’90s, but as a format it’s not interesting because it’s too small. You have no space for art cover, the lyrics cannot be read; you must go and fetch something to see the lyrics, and [picks up vinyl copy of Mr. Wollogallu] this is an object. This is an object.

Apart from the music inside, you have a cover, well visible, you can read the things, and it’s proven that the industry committed a big mistake when they went to CD. The quality is not good and the format is a plastic, small, uninteresting format.

That’s why it has killed, it has killed. This revival is a blast, because it permits records like this to come back, and many others. I bless this revival. I don’t know how it happened, nobody knows. It’s a question of going back to origins or going back to analog. Going back to distortion, because there’s a lot of distortion and CD doesn’t allow distortion.

Distortion is [makes a breaking sound], it’s different, and here you can have a good head room and you can control distortion in the mastering process, which is very interesting. The distortion is there. You cannot really listen to it, but it’s there and the harmonics are there, so in the end you’ll listen to it. That’s why people like the vinyl, it’s an elastic environment. It’s not strict like the CD. I think it’s because of the vinyl revival that this came back to life. [holds up the Mr. Wollogallu record]

It’s not only the music. Music rarely exists in itself. There is always some other thing attached to music. Either the face of the beautiful artist or the vinyl revival or a label that decided to invest in that artist and that’s how you know it. Brian Eno was interviewed for Red Bull. He was saying a very interesting thing, “I know lots of music that have as much quality as unknown music, unknown music that has as much quality as known music. And nobody knows it.” Why is this?

This is terrible, to know that there is music, fantastic music, that never reached an audience. Why is that? Nobody picked up on it. There was no vinyl revival, no editor, it was unlucky. How many things, good, fantastic music you don’t know? Many, many, many music. Why is that? I think there’s always some piece of random process to make things happen. You don’t have a decision on your own life. I never decided to put this record out again. It was the editors, so it’s not because of me. I only made the music. It’s what I made.

Maybe the work I’m doing today gets known and 20 years time it’s a good hope for me. It’s fantastic, it’s always good.

Lauren Martin

Carlos, thank you very much for your time today.

Carlos Maria Trindade

Thank you very much. Thank you. [applause]