A conversation with Adrián de Alfonso

Adrián De Alfonso, a Spanish artist based in Berlin since 2011, has previously released music under the moniker Don The Tiger. His latest album, Viator, A recording debut under his own name.

I loved Viator, a unique fusion of field recordings, acoustic guitar, whistles, and tribal percussion. Adrián de Alfonso reinterprets tango, bolero, flamenco, and sardana through minimalism, folk, and avant-garde elements, creating a standout album.

I reached out to Adrián De Alfonso with a few questions, and he generously took the time to respond. We discussed his music, Viator in particular, as well as his work in sound design for films and installations. His answers are rich in detail and make for a fascinating read. Buena lectura:

Being born in La Coruña, raised in Barcelona, and now based in Berlin, how have these diverse cultural environments shaped your musical framework, especially your deep roots in flamenco, bolero, copla, tango, and sardana?

Having lived in places with such different (and in some cases so developed) local scenes seems to me a privilege. Traveling and touring is important to broaden one's perspective, but what I find really transformative is to stay in a place, investigate it in depth, see what things are done there, what resonates with you and what doesn't, go to another place, come back, see what has changed, realize how you have changed with respect to those changes, etc. Having the possibility of experimenting with different contexts brings breadth of vision, and if you can also do it with time to reflect and assimilate, it’s easier to acquire the necessary perspective to get closer to the core of what you really are at a given moment and transmit something to others... I suspect that having had this privilege allows my work to be well received in many more places than if I hadn't had it, something that is happening to me more and more frequently all over Europe, despite making music that is not easy to pigeonhole and singing in Spanish.

My trajectory is far from special, but I guess that it pretty much explains many things... For work reasons, my parents were forced to move a lot between La Coruña and Barcelona when I was little, which I guess helped to forge in me a certain breadth of vision. Having had one foot in Galicia, which historically and for countless reasons has been a rather forgotten territory, I think has led me to follow my curiosity without worrying about what people will say, in a discreet way and without having to be accountable to anyone. In Barcelona, on the other hand, I learned to handle the melody, the rhythm, and the narrative of the song, although that cost me a lot of mannerisms, which fortunately I am getting rid of every day… In Berlin I have absorbed very closely -and continue to do so- what experimental music is, the limits of the formats, the mixture of styles and expressions, etc. All of this could amount to chaos, but if I stop to think about it, that pretty much sums up where I'm at right now.

As for the styles you mention, they may give you more or less clues as to why I do what I do, but it may also be -as a friend was telling me the other day- that my new material doesn't sound like any of them at all... What is clear to me is that this music lends itself very much to interpretation, something I suspect is enhanced by its extremely skeletal nature... In any case, all those styles were important in my shaping, but, strangely enough, almost none of them has gone through me by the simple fact of living in those places or coming from a special musical lineage... So, if someone accuses me of appropriationism, I'll have to agree with them.

I could of course say that the fact that I spent half my life in Barcelona, where there are so many people from Latin America, might have made me interested in music like salsa or bolero or tango, but my deep love for these genres has been the result of a very conscious decision motivated by my insatiable curiosity and a context that, fortunately, has always been very rich and open.

Flamenco is also a kind of music that was in the air during my Barcelona runs and in my previous projects, but its influence is more palpable now than before for several reasons, mainly because I am increasingly convinced that knowing how to shed the accessory -a key feature of flamenco- is the most important thing to move forward and transmit with clarity… That in these times of excess and consumerist maelstrom a flamenco singer sits on a chair, opens the arms and emits a moan that reaches your soul and in a microsecond disfigures your life is not only an act of overwhelming beauty and depth, but also a brutal philosophical statement. My philosophy is very much on the side of needing as little as possible, that's why I don't cringe when people say my music is flamenco or that I have duende, something that has happened after some of my live performances... In any case, if anyone still has doubts about why I have no qualms about being included in that tradition, I refer you to the podcast I did a couple of years ago talking precisely about flamenco and all these appropriationism issues: Sasha Pas talks with Adrián De Alfonso (Don the Tiger) about the influence of Flamenco on the musical culture of the XX century.

Sardana is the only one of all the genres you mention that I haven't become obsessed with and that has naturally permeated me, mainly because I grew up in Catalunya. And while I love its slow, relentless, martial, muted-like beat and those layers of strangled winds, I couldn't tell you the title of just one sardana... I suspect that my love for some of the brass runs that Ornette Coleman with Don Cherry and Albert Ayler with his brother Don engaged in back in the day helped that old-fashioned Catalan music stick in my soul, if only on a subconscious level and in a very, very abstract way.

Your portfolio includes sound design for films and installations, such as “NEKYA,” “Brief History of a Family,” and others, of course. I saw both and found them to be quite outstanding projects. How does your approach differ when creating music for visual media compared to standalone musical pieces?

Obviously, each task has its particularities, but for me, it doesn't make much sense to think of both activities as completely sealed, but as practices with a high potential to influence and reinforce each other, like almost everything I do in my life. Ideally, each album or film has its working methodology, depending on what interests me at the time, the tools I have at hand, the available time and budget, and the collaborators involved, but beyond those starting conditions there are several common points between how I usually approach albums and soundtracks.

First of all, I understand a record not so much as a series of different pieces, but as a big composition that develops in different stages, so in both cases, there’s a narrative to work with and an intensity to manage without losing perspective or pace. Besides, the music on my albums is almost always inspired by ultra-gestural and expressive images of bodies in movement (not so much landscapes) that I visualize and feel abstractly, so in the end you could say that they are soundtracks of films that I create inside me… Having developed such a close relationship between image and music makes it quite natural for me to think of visual footage almost as a musical element, which renders the compositional aspect of soundtracks very intuitive to me.

Lately, for both films and albums, I work in a very similar way: first I carry out a process of accumulating ideas that for me fit the parameters I've been ruminating on or talking about with the director, then comes an attentive listening of what I've just dumped without looking at the screen -I like when soundtracks work on their own- where you see how everything works and discard (usually many) things, and finally, a process of refinement, where you move, edit and process. For me it is very important to let the material breathe, to pay special attention to the first few listens, take care not to fatigue the ear -my main instrument for composing, as I have no classical training-, and to know when to look at the screen and when not to. I work a lot synaesthetically, assigning colors to each audio track in my editing programs, so sometimes it's not easy to find the balance in that sense.

What is it like to work with filmmakers such as Regina de Miguel on one hand and Lin Jianjie on the other?

Every collaborator is a world.

Regina is one of my best friends and working with her is not just about doing the sound design for an installation or the music for a film, it's also a way of being in the world together, sharing things, getting excited, and taking care of each other.

With JJ Lin, on the other hand, our relationship has been very succinct and mostly through emails. One day I received a very polite message from him in which he asked me for permission to use a fragment of the soundtrack I had composed for ‘Eternal love’ in his latest film ‘Brief history of a Family’ to which I agreed, as I liked what he told me about the movie. A little over a year later, the film was presented at the Berlinale, where we had a very brief meeting, and since then we have had several conversations about the possibility of working together in the future... We’ll see where that takes us.

Viator is a deeply evocative album. The album has a vivid, cinematic quality to it. Did you have visual imagery or scenes in mind while composing the music?

Visual imagery is very important in everything I do.

In the early stages of composing the album I juxtaposed loops I created with images I liked randomly displayed on my computer: mostly pictures of people singing, playing, painting, talking... I'm particularly inspired by photos of people expressing themselves, something that, paradoxically, is no longer abundant... In any case, listening to those loops while looking at those images led me to establish unexpected connections that sometimes provided me with a very clear line to follow, both sonically and lyrically.

For me it is essential to take advantage of the contrast that randomness gives you, something that Gysin and Burroughs knew well, and that many people do today with the help of AI. Putting my imagination or my planning skills to dry work certainly doesn't give great results, and I find it much more interesting to try to embrace and incorporate what comes from outside, whether accidental or not. That kind of embracing, I think, contains everything that can be communicated at any given moment… And of course, facing certain things can be difficult and require some preparation, but that is what my daily practice is all about.

Another process in which randomness played an important role in ‘Viator’ was in the writing of lyrics… Once I had the definitive loops and the first sung phrases, I used the Spanish rhyming dictionary, not exactly to rhyme, but to change some of the words I had already written so as to create impossible clashes of meaning that would open up new paths of exploration. For those who don't understand Spanish, I just want to point out that this album has no rhymes, no verses and no choruses. These songs are like those drawings you make without lifting your pencil: a line that appears, unfurls in a thousand directions and finally disappears. For me, that's the pinnacle of songwriting: a kind of wagon that takes you along a winding track and doesn't let you get off it until the rail ends.

In Viator, you collaborated with other artists, and in the album’s description, you mentioned that it was "recorded with a bunch of piezos and cheap mics (sometimes with the window open) in de Alfonso's bedroom in Berlin, in a bathroom (without vents) in the Alpujarra of Granada, and in some desert locations around Almería, allowing for an incessant crossfading through time, spaces, and membranes. A traveller on the rise, not just flowing through, but permeating the space with a newfound awareness." How did these collaborations influence the final product, and how did their contributions integrate with your lo-fi, experimental recording approach?

For the sung songs on this album I had a pretty clear plan of how they should sound and be played, but not by whom. My budget was extremely low -I was going to pay for the album out of my own pocket- and we were in the middle of a pandemic, so the possibilities were limited, but, as is often the case, the most suitable collaborators were closer at hand than I thought… After a couple of emails and phone calls, the plan was quickly defined.

The essential tracks would be recorded in my room in Berlin, with Mike Majkowski (double bass), Andi Stecher (percussion) and Siri Salminen (tap dancing). We would use some mid-range mics that Alberto Lucendo (the best engineer I know) would lend me and help me place at different points in the room, so that I could zoom in and out in the album mix. To give more body to the textures and depth to the spaces, we would add a couple of piezos and some crappy mics that I had, along with some reamping, reel-to-reel tape processing, fm radio transmission and no-input mixing, methods that I’ve used and abused for years in my live performances... Given the particularities of the situation, we would have many hours not only to work out the subtleties required for such sparse and repetitive music, but also to experiment, both with the interpretation of the songs and how to record them.

Mike, Andi and Siri are all very physical musicians, so paying attention to the thumps and creaks they made when playing the sung songs gave me a thousand ideas for the interludes and the more textural layers of the album. The same thing happened later in La Alpujarra with the murmuring choir formed by Víctor Herrero, Lorena Álvarez and Marcos Flórez, whose throat clearings or inhales/exhales captivated me almost more than the harmonies themselves.

One advantage -or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it- of having worked on films where the soundtrack was composed from the sound design elements (something that has already happened to me on four occasions) is that by listening to a micron of sound you can imagine a whole track, built from infinite repetitions, edits and processing... This arguable skill, together with the relaxed atmosphere of the recording sessions and the torrential character of all those musicians, provided me with an overabundance of recorded abstract sound material, which made it possible to shape the sound design of the album in (probably too) many directions... The sifting that came later I'd rather not remember... In other words, that liveliness you refer to is not accidental at all.

The idea I had for ‘Viator’ was to contrast clean and dirty sounds, close and distant, planned and accidental, dry and ultra processed... I wanted there to be no sonic hierarchies and to work the sound in a sculptural and asymmetrical way so as not to fall into the hackneyed and flat. I wanted to play with sounds that trapped you because you didn't really know in which plane they were living, but you could feel them. To reach total immersion... I love psychoacoustics, and in ‘Viator’ I pushed it to the maximum... Luckily I was able to count on Alberto's help, who also supervised the final stages of mixing and mastering so that these ideas didn't get out of hand.

So, rather than lo-fi as we know it, I would say that my approach with this album has been unorthodox, and that I have made the most of what I had at my disposal, which to many may seem scarce, but to me proved to be of overwhelming abundance.