Luis is a multi-instrumentalist that has been making music under the
name Saturnia since the late 1990’s. He lives near Lisboa and in his Butterfly
Studios, plays a huge range of instruments and on most of his albums he plays
everything.
His music is very much inspired by 1968-1972 Pink Floyd, the more
mystical side of the early 70s German bands.
Luis’s newest album is something different though. Here he gathered two
of his musician friends and decided to choose a number of songs from all of his
previous albums and record live over several days. These were later mixed and
then mastered at the Electrohasch studio by Stephen Koglek (Colour Haze).
Electrohasch has for many years, released all of the Saturnia albums on CD or
LP, including this new one.
Did you grow up in a musical family? What was the first instrument you played?
Luís Simões - More
or less, my father had some LPs, he liked light Jazz and Blues/Gospel type
of music and my mother had a good voice and she sang in a amateur choir,
more of a classical type. The first instrument I played seriously was guitar.
You play many instruments very well. Did you have
proper musical training? Attend a music school? Was guitar always
your primary instrument?
Luís Simões - Yes
I did, although incomplete. I studied classical guitar when i was a teenager in
a proper music school but that was all over when i spent all the money I
had saved for years and bought a Korean Gibson Explorer
copy. My parents were very worried.
Guitar was always my primary instrument, but at a
certain point i started noticing that i could do more than just fiddling
on other instruments, initially other stringed instruments, then
keyboards and so on. It was when I discovered the versatility of musicians
like Brian Jones, Steve Howe or Mike Oldfield that I realized that
that was something for me.
Your music (to me) is very inspired by 1968-1972 era
Pink Floyd. It is a reference that I hear a lot when listen to your records. I
assume you are a fan of Pink Floyd? What other older bands have inspired you?
Luís Simões - When
i was 16 I used to play bass over the Pompeii VHS tape
but I hardly listen to them anymore.
If you like Psychedelic, Progressive, improvisational,
sophisticated, exploratory Rock music, you can't avoid them,
they pretty much invented it. This "Floydian" vibe is essentially
a mood and a type of musical approach and philosophy that you will
find in many other bands of the same period like Hawkwind or some German
bands like Yatha Sidra or Pulsar from France, which are one of my favorite
bands ever. I see Saturnia as the natural descendant from those artists in
the 21st century. (So do I Luis!!)
How did you get interested in playing the sitar? It
is not very common in Portuguese Music.
Luís Simões - Curiously,
when most people talk to me about the Sitar they assume i picked it up
because of George Harrison and The Beatles or Ravi
Shankar, maybe because of the "spiritual" overtones on
Saturnia's music; but it was because of Brian Jones and Paint it Black, i
remember the first time i listened to that song, i was in absolute awe.
Another very big thing for me was that
Manuel Cardoso had a Sitar on the two first Tantra albums, which was
terribly cool. Curiously, my Sitar approach is closer to Exotica and
stuff like the Vampyros Lesbos soundtrack than actually
Indian Classical music.
What bands did you play with before deciding to make
music all on your own?
Luís Simões - Before
Saturnia i played in a spoken word duo named Friends of the Locust,
we did one demo in 1991, I also played in a classical Portuguese Metal
band named Shrine, we did two demos and two albums between 1991 and 1996, and
still have quite a cult going on over here. From 2003 until last year i also was in another
band, which was very big over here in Portugal, Blasted Mechanism,
with whom i did five studio albums and a live album. I started Saturnia in 1996 and I'm still doing it.
There is a lot of complex symbolism in the artwork on
alpha omega alpha? What inspired this album artwork? Can you also speak about
your other early albums artwork?
Luís Simões - The
artwork for AOA is structurally inspired in Masonic charts in
its form and was designed to translate to image the musical and
metaphysical components of Saturnia and Saturnia's music; my thinking
process, my past and my projected future, so from this perspective it works
like a sigil. Each and every symbol has its meaning and spell, so it is
also a magic thing. It's the visuals for the psychedelic Grand lodge
of forever, if you like. The AOA artwork is the only Saturnia cover
that isn't photographic. The other album covers also translate their
own different concepts to image in different ways, for example, on
The Glitter Odd artwork the background is the actual wallpaper in my
bedroom at my parent's house, because the whole album rotated around the
general idea of someone listening to an old LP in his bedroom; on the Muzak
album the photos relate directly to the song's individual themes and are
presented like in a gallery.
Describe how you go about making a song from scratch.
What instrument do you record first? Do you write out the music on paper?
Luís Simões - Although
i have no set way to do this, I generally jam some guitar or
bass or keyboards with a generic aesthetic idea, concept or vibe on top of
a beat for a while and see what happens, i start working around those original
improvisations adding other components, like vocals or more instrumentation,
when i have a good mass of raw tracks i then start cleaning up and digging for
what is the core identity of the piece, both from a purely musical and thematically
perspective. Basically I gather sonic clay, listen to what it suggests to
me and then sculpt it. I only write music when I have to communicate
with other musicians; on my own I just record everything.
What is your studio like? Do you record to analog
tape or use the computer (Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools) or a mix of both?
Luís Simões - My
studio is a very simple DIY functional thing. I use both analog and
digital gear to record and play, it depends on the musical situation itself. As far as recording is concerned, the practical side
of analog is awfull but things always sound more dynamic and generally better,
digital is more practical and offers more working flexibility but always sounds
harsher or at least a bit stiff. Nowadays it is "de rigueur" to like
analog but most people forget that there is very bad analog gear,
just like there is bad digital gear. When I started, there was
basically just analog and it was forbiddingly expensive to do a
good top production, with digital that really changed, fortunately. I
really think that if all the older artists that recorded
analog in the 60s, 70s and 80s, had a choice back then, they
would have recorded on Cubase.
Lets talk a bit about your new album, the Séance
Tapes? Where did the idea for the title come from? How did you chose the tracks
from all your different albums? You actually formed a band for this album. Had
you previously made music with Nuno and André before? What bands are they from?
Luís Simões - Well,
I think that at this point in time, for a regular artist it would be
time to do a Live album, which i think wouldn't be really honest as Saturnia
never really played live that much; another possibility would be to do a
compilation, best of type of album, which would be just boring, so i did
something inbetween and did a "live in the studio" album. This album, instead of a spiritualist séance, is a
musical seance in which we are visited by songs from Saturnia's past,
that's the concept for the whole record. For reasons related to my
personal life and other musical projects i was involved in up until recently, i
wanted to do an album as fast as I could to keep me moving onwards, so I got in
the studio, played for about a week and recorded everything we did, this album
is basically a rehearsal recording, everything is loose and natural. After
that i picked the best takes, mixed
it and finally mastered with Stefan Koglek. This one was
that straightforward, i didn't wanted to do something polished, i wanted this
to be the raw Saturnia, I've done a full circle in life and my Rock roots
are really evident on this album. We recorded more material than it actually ended up on
the album, i tried to provide a setlist that would synthetize Saturnia for
someone who has never heard it, that was the criteria, to do an album
that explained Saturnia; curiously it ended up being exactly two tracks
from each album, that just sort of happened .
Why no bass player? You play bass on a lot of your
songs.
Luís Simões - Yes
I do, I play electric bass on all Saturnia tracks, on all the
albums, with a couple of exceptions. For this album I wanted to keep things as simple and
real as possible on all fronts and i love working in trio mode, which I
think is the best for Saturnia. This album just reflects what
Saturnia is in its live, present day, incarnation.
-Are there plans to keep this trio together and record
a proper album together, perhaps play more concerts inside and outside
Portugal?
Luís Simões - Yes,
It's my intention to keep working live, both in Portugal and in Europe
with the trio line up. The next album is not going to be like The Seance
Tapes but i liked the spark of interaction and i plan to produce it in
slightly similar ways, so part of it is going to be real, live takes, that’s
for sure. I don't really know when this is going to happen but i do
have lots of new material, maybe for next year or 2020 there
will be a new Saturnia album.
No comments:
Post a Comment