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There is a palpable
myth of Cuba among Americans: Intoxicating cigar smoke. Senoritas and
Orishas. Totalitarianism with one part iron-fist, one part heart of gold,
and three parts rum. Soviet cars from the 1950s. Buena Vista Social Club.
The U.S. embargo
on Cuba has largely succeeded in limiting economic exchange between the
two countries. The embargo shares the status of a Cold War relic with
the Soviet cars that congest Cuban streets, the absurdity of both symbols
having been long etched into the collective perception of relations between
the two countries along with the images of cigars, senoritas, and the
leathery persistence of Castro’s face.
Culture inevitably
diffuses despite the best attempts of our politicians, and the rich heritage
of Cuban music has found increasingly receptive audiences in America.
Brown professor, indie rock luminary, author, and digital media maestro
Robert Arellano directs Rock the Blockade (www.rocktheblockade.com), a
group that aims to increase the speed and ease of this cultural exchange
while calling attention to social and humanitarian issues relating to
the U.S. embargo against Cuba. But it’s sultrier than it may sound…
Havanarama’s
Havana Club is one of two releases the stems from the Rock the Blockade
project. The other is a live concert from Havana featuring Havanarama,
Speed to Roam, David Pajo, and Will Oldham of ‘Bonnie Prince Billy’
fame. Havanarama is a collaboration between Arellano and Jasper Speicher,
the Brown computer music graduate program’s John Nash. It’s
a valiant effort to unite two musical forms whose drunken suggestive glances
at one another have, before now, amounted to nothing more than flirtation
and disappointment, if that.
It’s an odd
contrast, indeed. The history of Cuban music is expectedly organic, its
cultural authenticity passed over by Cuba’s eternal forward march.
The history of computer music evokes images of lonely university men in
the 1960s with big grants and bigger computers. Castro shakes his fist
at the sky while a somber hombre strums an old guitar and chews his last
cigar. A million Powerbooks crawl forth from the cesspool of academia’s
avant-techguard. I’m reminded of Tim Robbins on cultural exchange:
“dialectics.”
Like Tim Robbins’
command of the English language, Havanarama inspired me. Unfortunately,
I have neither Powerbook nor extensive knowledge of Cuban musical traditions.
I decided that my Havanarama interview would act as my contribution to
their project—a pastiche of the organic and computer-generated,
a tense integration of two separate email interviews. In short, cultural
exchange with unpredictable and, probably, revolutionary results.
Dawn Terry, Indy Managing Editor, describes the record: “It’s
like the time I passed out in a Berlin nightclub and woke up on the beach
of sultry, sultry Cuba with a ponche muy fuerte in my hand and Ché
whispering sweet nothings about the Revolution into my ear as the sun
rose over the ocean. Or something.”
Bobby Arellano: Great
ideas, Alex! I’ll have In Your Ear carry a few copies of Havana
Club next week (ask for it at the counter), so you can mention the store
as well as www.havanarama.com in the article!
I: What sort of stuff were you listening to when you made Havana Club?
B: MC Paul Barman, Brazilian acid rock (from the Tropicalia movement)
and samba (Antonio Carlos Jobim), boleros by a Cuban legend named Bola
de Nieve and ballads by a Mexican trio called Trio Los Panchos, Led Zeppelin.
Jasper Speicher: I listened to Boards of Canada, Kruder & Dorfmeister,
Radiohead, Aphex Twin, Underworld, Juno, noise off the street (literally),
Philip Glass, Elvis Costello.
I: I don’t know anyone else making music that combines electronic
beats with Cuban influences. What were you thinking?
B: Jasper colonized me. Or I ruralized Jasper. Or those folk musicians
from Pinar del Rio, Cuba (sampled on Jasper’s interstitial mixes)
invaded both our asses.
J: I have no idea what I was thinking! Well… I was thinking the
world needs different music… no, REALLY different music. I guess
I don’t really know what music is, though, so how can I make it
different? Hmmm… you see, my two driving forces are almost orthogonal:
creating beauty and creating a mockery. Often I combine these to create
something different. A beautiful mockery? Except I wouldn’t say
that Havana Club is a mockery of any form, Cuban, rock, hip-hop or electronica.
I think it’s more like a spirited jab and a pat on the back.
I: How different are your musical tastes, and how did this affect the
project?
B: There were a lot of listening sessions with Jasper’s laptop pitted
against my turntables.
J: Taste? I have none. I don’t really value taste, to tell you the
truth, because any attempt to define it gets messy, self referential,
and elitist. It frustrates the hell out of me, though, because other people
“have taste,” and they expect artists (well, really, popular
musicians) to create for taste, rather than for fun, or interest, or a
sense of social purpose.
I: Not many people are doing work that samples live music. How does this
feel different from sampling prerecorded stuff?
B: You’ll have to ask Jasper, but I suspect one feels more leeway
sampling field recordings because there aren’t expectations to stay
strictly on-beat as in hip hop and samples of studio recordings.
J: I don’t really have a personal history of sampling to compare
the “feeling” to. I think Bob is right, in that sampling prerecorded
music requires one to engage the fetishistic cultural-objecthood of a
sound, whereas sampling obscure, live music makes it easier to engage
a sample as an acoustic phenomenon.
I: Not many traditionally ethnic musical genres have incorporated electronic
elements. Is there some unrealized potential here, or do most creators
of ethnic music just not have Powerbooks?
B: There are a few people who are recording country musicians in Pinar
del Rio in home studios with Pro Tools, but you’re right that technology,
even “consumer-grade,” is too expensive for most musicians
in the Third World. Maybe when Jasper and I play in Pinar del Rio we’ll
bring some simple electronic noisemakers (beeping keychains, singing greeting
cards—the kinds of things you get at a dollar store) and try to
play some of the laptop sounds “live.” More likely evolution
will be occasional Cuban salsa orchestras hearing a CD like Havana Club
and experimenting with the horn section, say, reproducing (and improvising
off) some of the electronic sounds with brass. Bad ass!
J: Well, I think you would be surprised at how much “abstract electronic”
music you can dig up where this happens. However, rock rarely enters the
picture. I think it is indicative of the slow decline of the computer
from high-tech to commonplace. Like folk musicians, we don’t produce
tracks in studios, we make music in our living rooms and on our porches.
I: Does any sort of literary strain frame Havana Club’s lyrics?
Are any based on real experiences (“You plant those berries on the
couch and I bust out the sherry”)?
B: There’s some very sparse autobiographical material, sometimes
made sparser by Speicher, as in the case of when he recorded me reading
ten minutes of a short story and extracted just one phrase, “One
little siesta,” making it the refrain on “(Ever Since that
Time) You Blue up on Me.” But listening to a lot of Cuban and Mexican
ballad music, I sometimes adapt traditionals (“Pretty Little Sky”
borrows from my own translations of “Cielito lindo” and “Las
mañanitas”). The heart of the record, however, is a suicide
note I wrote and decided to sing instead of deliver the goods.
I: The future: Powerbooks, guitars, or communism?
B: Horrendophones!
J: Horrendophones.
Alex Provan B’05
digs cultural exchange
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