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Nuno
Canavarro: Plux Quba In the age of
the Internet arcane information is only a few clicks away. Arguments over
which character actor appeared in a movie, arguments that years ago would
have raged for months and involved someone writing in to Parade Magazine
for a definitive answer, can now be settled in the time it takes to log on
and head over to the Internet Movie Database. A single brain is just not
an efficient storehouse for detailed information, and there's no need to
remember trivia anymore. The Internet remembers it for us. Given the
explosion of available information, it's rare now that a work of art goes
public while its maker remains anonymous. Somewhere along the way an
interview happens or a press release is re-written, and the results get
posted on a Web site somewhere. Sometimes, however, by choice or
circumstance, anonymity happens. Due to peculiarities of timing, a
language barrier, and (most important), a brief recording history,
Portuguese musician Nuno Canavarro has essentially remained anonymous,
almost twenty years after he started working in music. To say
Canavarro biography is sketchy is an understatement. I don’t know when
he was born or the details of his early musical interests. So near the
ground is Canavarro's profile, in fact, it occurred to me that he might be
a hoax, some canny exercise in media manipulation broadcast by a cynical
hipster. I suppose fraud remains a possibility, but I was convinced of
Canavarro's flesh and blood existence by the many Portuguese web pages
that referenced his music. Seeding a prank in two languages just seemed
like too much trouble for a cheap laugh. From these Portuguese sites, I
learned that Canavarro played keyboards in the early 80s with a moderately
successful New Wave band called Street Kids, who at their peak opened for
Tangerine Dream. Street kids disbanded in 1983, and we next pick up the
trail five years later, when Canavarro released his first and only solo
record. He titled this small masterpiece of electroacoustic composition
Plux Quba. Plux Quba flew
far under the radar at the time of its release, and it might have remained
essentially unheard outside Portugal's experimental music crowd had it not
fallen into the hands of a few key people, including tireless Chicago
musician Jim O'Rourke. A story circulated that O'Rourke, Jan St. Werner
(of Mouse on Mars and Microstoria), and Carsten Schulz (who has recorded
as C-Schulz, and with Hans-Juergen Schunk as C-Schulz & Hajsch) came
across a copy of Plux Quba while traveling through Europe together in 1991
and fell in love with what they heard. O'Rourke started a record label
called Moikai in 1998, and his first release was a reissue of Plux Quba,
remixed and remastered by Portuguese guitarist and composer Rafael Toral. This tale
sounds a bit apocryphal to those familiar with both the record and the
characters, because Plux Quba sounds so tightly bound with music all three
would later create. It's almost too easy to say that Microstoria, Jan St.
Werner's experimental ambient project with Oval's Markus Popp, was
"inspired" by Plux Quba, because the latter, in its use of
small, quivering sounds, clicks and pops, sounds like such an obvious
forbearer. Something similar can be said of the self-titled C-Schulz &
Hajsch album, and some of O'Rourke's electronic works. All occupy a
soundworld similar to Plux Quba, yet Canavarro's record was recorded in
1988, a couple years before even the ambient house of artists like the
Orb, and well before the idea of abstract "laptop music"
emerged. If you stand
back and consider Plux Quba objectively, it seems without precedent and
years before its time. In short, the fact that this album was initially
recorded in 1988 is nothing short of amazing. But so what? Obscurity and
"being ahead of one's time" don't necessarily have anything to
do with quality. These subjective characteristics are of interest to
would-be musicologists and trainspotters, not to those squatting before
their CD rack, searching the spines for something interesting to listen to
on a Tuesday evening. Surely the most essential qualities of Plux Quba,
are not its puzzling origins, startling originality or eerie prescience,
but that it is warm, playful, pretty and endlessly listenable. Still, it would
be dishonest to deny that the mystery of Plux Quba adds to its appeal. The
fact is I'm particularly curious about Nuno Canavarro because this record
seems so personal; I listen and feel like I know him. Plux Quba is a
disjointed, unpredictable work that sounds like the aural representation
one sensitive and intelligent individual's subconscious thoughts. Like a
mind, Plux Quba veers from one fragment to the next, leapfrogs over an
idea and lands on another, recalls a forgotten memory for an instant only
to have it vanish before it can be examined in detail. Some of the fifteen
tracks (only seven are titled) run for about a minute, the longest is just
over five, and all bleed one into the next. The connection between these
musical fragments becomes clear after repeated listens, and they
eventually coalesce into a unified and uncommonly intimate expression.
Because Plux Quba sounds so personal and idiosyncratic, I can't help but
yearn for a few facts about its maker to complete the story. Those blanks
may never be filled, but I still have the record. Canavarro is credited on
the sleeve with electronics, melodica, and pre-recorded tapes. Some of the
pre-recorded material captures the sound of acoustic instruments, such as
the glowing harp that provides the foundation of "Wask," but the
most memorable use of tapes are the ghostly voices that appear throughout
the album. These vocalizations take many forms - they speak Portuguese,
utter syllables without words, spin gracefully backward, and,
occasionally, sing. It has been noted that Canavarro's murmuring,
indistinct vocal cut-ups bear a resemblance to Robert Ashley's 1979 piece
"Automatic Writing," where Ashley explored the idea of
involuntary utterances over the course of a quiet 40-minute composition.
Whether Ashley's piece inspired Canavarro I cannot say, but these voices
seem to be serve a similar intermediary role between composer and
listener, valiantly attempting to articulate the confused, aching, but
ultimately grateful heart at the center of Plux Quba. The
voices convey a range of moods and scenes with striking vividness. I
picture the young woman casually singing beneath plinking chords on "Bruma"
to be walking down a beach on an overcast afternoon in Lagos, the broken
synthesizer noodling acting as a soundtrack accompaniment to the cinematic
scene. Track 5 sounds like a transcription of a psychotherapy session
braided with a fourth-generation master of Brian Eno's Music for Airports;
there's something almost voyeuristic about it, and I'd feel guilty
listening in if the vocalizations weren't processed beyond recognition.
And the minute-long track 13, with a baby singing over chopped-up,
glitch-laden organ chords (sounding all the world like an interlude on
Boards of Canada's Music Has the Right to Children), explores the
uncertain terrain of a child's outlook. The lovely sixth track has a classical air to it, as a soprano voice is spun backward alongside reversed strings and organ chords, but most of the record has the cozy feel of folk music, despite the primarily electronic origins. Track 7 uses small organ gurgles to simulate a chorus of birds, and it's particularly odd because it's so clearly "fake" and yet sounds organic and true, like these are the calls of the birds as a certain off-kilter brain remembers it. The wistful, nostalgic "Cave" is among the album's most affecting tracks, with nervous, hesitant hand percussion forming the rhythmic foundation for meandering organ chords and a plaintive melodica melody. It's like a sad end to a period of prolonged joy, and then the untitled closing track that follows, consisting of little more than a simple music-box keyboard melody, takes an even more beautiful and melancholy turn. This confluence of thoughts and emotions, streaming along endlessly with the imprecision of a human mind, makes Plux Quba a wonderful space to inhabit. Mark Richardson
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