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The musical kastrupian

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Guilherme Kastrup is one of the instrumentalist musicians and most recognized musical producers in the Brazilian music scene. Although he has a professional track with more than two decades was only in 2013 that it released its first solo album and he promises to do the same feat already next year, when it reaches its point of mutation.

You are a musician already with a long career, you produced immense reputed artists in Brazil, why only in 2013 you decide to make an album in your own name?
Guilherme Kastrup: I never thought much about this solo career story, or author. My vocation is as an instrumentalist musician and I lived through it for many years. Then I started to get interested in the studio part, to record and produce some things. In this process I started to play with some things, as an authorial play, but without any pretension. This record was built over a long time, ten years, from studio plays and I began to recognize that I had a work that deserved to be released with soul. I started to organize this with the thought of an album.

You are a percussionist, but the album has a very technological part. How did you go from this instrumental phase to the digitized sounds?
GK: I think it was two interests at the same time. This part of tinkering with the sampling and clipping of digital music is a thing of playing in a percussive way with various sounds that are not instruments initially recorded and repositioned with this characteristic that the sample can give. You play with electronic drums and recorded sounds from a variety of backgrounds and that's what really interested me and what I discovered. The other part is the studio recording, of production in which I dived deep into the background, did recording, clipping, that much of the digital music and editing, is a bit like the plastic arts. This cross between plastic arts and music is what has made this desire to do a very bright authorial work.

What sounds did you record? We can hear that you have animals, sometimes they seem to be more urban sounds.
GK: I record a little bit of everything, as you realized, there are ten urban sounds of machines, cars and this intense thing that the city has and there are also more dreamlike sounds of cicadas, birds, speeches and interviews. There is a song that is an interview of Cartola that I cut and transform into music from its scanning, it's a cut and paste game that allows me to do things in a way as if I had composed electronic music, only from acoustic elements of all origins.

Then how did you choose these cuts, in the middle of so many topics what was the selection criterion?

GK: There was a lot of playing, but it was choosing those that could form a set, most of the songs were born from the precursor itself, I moved with them, I discovered melodic themes in those tracks and then the themes started to be developed and only then I started to think about the whole. I really like this thing about the creation of the album, the idea of a record with beginning, middle and end and that the songs have connections between them, is something that was part of the selection so that the songs had in this set of "Kastrupismo".

You called it "Kastrupismo" because it, was you? Because you are that?
GK: Yes,

It is the mark of the individual being, of a work with soul.
GK: Exactly, I used my own name, Kastrup, because it was like saying that this is my way of making music, my way of doing it.

Do you have some entries and some lyrics, did this come later?
GK: Some of the yes and no, for example, Cartola started with the idea of cutting three of the interviews in which he was telling about the first sale of his samba, his astonishment when they arrived next him and offered him money and he said, are you crazy, dud? My interest in this story made me want to do something interesting with it and started from the speech to music. Other songs started from rhythm by entering lyrics, but they do not work exactly like a song. Normally, I work a lot with songs, my career is based on this as an accompanist, percussionist, or music producer. In my personal journey I wanted to get away from that format a bit and use the complete poetry in a freer way in the music structure. What I use as a lyric is more the complete poetry that I can assemble, disassemble in several parts and reassemble in another way. Every hour it appears in a different way and I gave myself the freedom to play with poetry in a different way and to escape from the more closed format that is the song.

Then you present another album that is "Sounds of Survival", which I think has an extra poetic side and is very different from "Kastrupismo". Why the name?
GK: Benjamin Taubkin named it. "Sounds of survival" came from a duo of percussion I have with Simone Sou, a great percussionist and we created Soukast which is a joke with our names, we created a repertoire from the repercussion and later we invite Benjamin Taubkin who is a great pianist and Brazilian thinker. This encounter was very sparkling, the result was very interesting, and we decided to record this album. When Benjamin suggested this title, I also wondered and asked him, then I understood the poetic sense of the kind of music we make, which is the resistance of human politics, of how we see the world, more autonomous in the way of creating and facing the society where people are, is physical and artistic survival. "Sounds of survival" has to do with this, a certain act of resistance, the art of human relations.

You are a producer of your own musical projects, if not, do you think there would be a space for you in the Brazilian music scene? Because you're so different?
GK: I do not know (laughs). I never thought of it with this focus of being a producer of my musical projects. Sometimes I felt I needed an outward look to say stop. Now, I'm finishing my second album and I think I'm a better producer of myself than the first.

Is it a second exercise of Kastrupismo?
GK: It will no longer be a Kastrupismo, but it is an exercise in a slightly different kind of game, my life has changed and this time the beginning of the songs are not the repercussions, but it was some meetings that promoted improvised music. I formed two trios with artists with whom I have a lot of connection and we made improvisations, from that I began to collect this material to make the compositions.

But, you are touring with your first record, in the shows you play songs from this second album?
GK: Not yet, I have not finished it yet. I finished the creative process, I have the album all set up, how I like to do everything, I like to think about the order, how the songs intertwine, what their history is like in the general context of the album and from there, I go mixing, mastering, but for now I'm in the creative process. I have not shown it to anyone yet, but I played a first song already in Lisbon and in Madeira.

Do you have a phrase that defines this second album?
GK: This album is going to be called perhaps "Point of mutation" in reference to a book that I read, that I found very beautiful, of Fritjof Capra. It has a concept of seeing mankind as a single living organism and that is at that point of mutation. We are at the end of a period, a cycle, a time dominated by the yang, the male, to move to a more ying, more feminine phase. I found this image very poetic, a physicist who studies sociology, the concept is very beautiful, because we are at the end of a cycle of humanity, we see this capitalist system in an act of boiling and it has everything to do with it. The album has to do with this world now.

When we talk about music in Brazil, we talk of popular music, bossa nova and as I said from the beginning your sound is very different, it is something that is seen more in Europe and USA, but we never hear about it in your country. How is the Brazilian market for your kind of musicality?
GK: Brazil is very rich musically. What passes out is these stereotypes of bossa nova, samba, but internally we have a very large production, especially in cities like São Paulo that has a flow for this. There is a lot of people interested, there is a market that moves, it is possible to live independent and experimental music even though it is outside the main popular circuits that in Brazil is very intense.

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